Nowhere To Turn

"You know what really gets me? I mean, here I am, I have to live in this stinking town and I gotta read in the newspapers about some hotshot kid, new star of the college team. Every year it's going to be a new one. And every year it's never going to be me. (Pause) I'm just going to be Mike. Twenty-year-old Mike. Thirty-year-old Mike. Old mean old man, Mike. These college kids out here are never going to get old or out of shape. Because new ones come along every year. And they're going to keep calling us Cutters. To them it's just a dirty word. To me it's just something else I never got a chance to be." from the movie Breaking Away.

One of my favorite movies is Breaking Away, a coming of age movie about four friends, with a focus on one who wants the acceptance of his father, the love of a woman, and to be a great cycles. In the scene where this quotes is taken, the friends are down at the quarry where deep holes were carved out of the rock, and stone was taken for construction use, and those holes eventually filled with water and are now used by young people as semi-private swimming pools. Mike, the former high school quarterback, played by a young Dennis Quaid, finds that his high school years have turned out to be the high point of his life (or so he thinks) and that the rest of his life is down hill all the way.

A similar sentiment is conveyed by John Updikes wonderful poem, The Ex-Basketball Player. (Read the poem at: ( http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1437753 )

In this poem there is a guy called Flick (because of the way he could flick the ball during high school Wizard B-ball games), and Flick was a faboulous high school basketball player. After graduation Flick failed to go on to greater and greater levels of success. As the poem opens, Flick is working at Berth’s Garage, pumping gas, changing tires, and every so often, when people came by who remembered his glory days, “. . . as a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,. . . ”

Such quotations and poems have a powerful impact on me, because I too feel age creeping up, and the older I get the more doors are closed to me. I’m two weeks I’ll be 58 years old. I have two knee replacements, and only so-so health, so running the Boston Marathon is not going to happen. I’m not going back to school to be a nurse, or a physical therapist, or a psychologist, or an art teacher. I'm not going to get my MFA at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Oh, yes, I read about people in their 70s, or 80s, and I think once I read about someone in their 90s who went back to college and earned that life long yearned for degree, so as long as one lives the options are technically there, but such an outcome is not likely, not for me.

It is a truth that time is running out.

In the long run, we’re all dead. ~John Maynard Keynes


I found a website that advertises itself as a place where people can go who are out of options. The Header reads as follows:

I Am Running Out of Options

Options do run out, so maybe if you tell us about your options we can help you weigh them out.....the good the not so good options

http://www.experienceproject.com/groups/Am-Running-Out-Of-Options/128756

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It is an interesting thing that such a site exists. If you wonder how someone would find this site, they probably typed in RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS into their search engine search box.

I suppose it is obvious that that is what I did and how I found the site. I feel like I’m running out of time. I feel like doors are closing. I feel as if my options grow fewer day by day.

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time. ~Dean Kamen

I did too. It once took two years for Christmas to arrive, and now it comes and goes as if one is connected by a short chain to the other. I feel like I was 17 yesterday, and now I'm 58 and I can't figure out what happened. I feel like I was mugged by time. I've had the crap kicked out of my by life.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing. ~Marcus Aurelius

Is Aurelius saying that life is a struggle? It is. Aurelius is also saying that life is not a fight, but more of a wrestling match. Wrestling is a struggle based on holds, not on punches or kicks.

Wrestling depends on strength, weight, and skill. In the middle of a match is not the time to develop strength and skill. If you are under weight, and in a struggle with a heavy weight, well, you just struggle until you are pinned and the mat is slapped three times.

Regardless of your age, you make choices, and move on, and it is very, very rare that you can go back and change choices.

One of my favorite poems is Two Roads Diverged

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

and sorry I could not travel both

and be one traveller, long I stood

and looked down one as far as I could

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to where it bent in the undergrowth;
then took the other, as just as fair,

and having perhaps the better claim

because it was grassy and wanted wear;

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though as for that, the passing there

had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay

in leaves no feet had trodden black.

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Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

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Somewhere ages and ages hence:

two roads diverged in a wood, and I --

I took the one less travelled by,

and that has made all the difference

In this poem, Mr. Frost implies that the choices of the speaker of this poem have made a difference (all the difference) in his life, or her life. It is a somewhat positive look back on the choices of that speaker’s life, but there is also a question hanging over the speaker’s life, "What if I had done something differently? What if I had made different choices? What would my life be like now if I had done something different then?"

Really, what are the options? Levi's or Wranglers. And you just pick one. It's one of those life choices. ~Harrison Ford

When you are 58 you do not have the options you had at 20, or 30. Am I going to save up a down payment for a house, and get a 30 year loan on the property? Am I going to move into a dorm and take out education loans and get a new degree? When you get close to 60 years of age it is not the time of life to prepare for life. When you approach 60 years of age, you look at time differently. Life is short. Options are fewer.

It is perhaps wise for me to consider this quote:

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being. ~Deepak Chopra

Mr. Chopra is saying in a better way that you are only as old as you feel. Or you are only as old as you act. Mr. Chopra is implying that if doors close to you, that you closed them yourself. If your options disappear, you cast that magic spell yourself. Maybe I should consider Chopra’s words carefully.