top of page

Once Upon A Time

murphree8

Looking back to when I was young and felt invincible, oh, it did not seem so long ago. Maybe even at forty-five this feeling was with me, but then the years dwindled down and suddenly I was a man entering my fifties, coming to the realities that there were things I could no longer do or control.


My body eventually said, it’s time to slow down and look around because I will no longer run that half marathon for you over rocky trails. My face told me that the lines across my forehead and surrounding my eyes tell a story, like a map that led me from somewhere long ago to this place I am now. The arthritis in my shoulder aches a little every day, but I do not regret running that Tough Mudder in a sling, and my meniscus tears in my knees read to me like a poem of longing and wanting just one last run over a mountain top. The scars on my body, the loss of sound in my ears, and aches that welcome me in the night, are a tribute to a younger man that challenged himself and pushed the limits. Not all men can claim that. And now that I have aged, I still stake claim to the challenges I place before me, but they have been modified for longevity.


Do not look down on the lines underneath my eyes or the thinning of my hair. They are souvenirs, well earned, from a million moments of laughter and tears. At my age, I am like a used truck that has traveled, seeing the countryside, carrying a load, with a well played list of music to guide me. The stories along the way stay with me in memory, some uplifting and others bring me crumbling down to the floor, grasping the earth looking for answers to questions that will never be revealed.


Once upon a time, when I was young and full of hope, I thought I would be a philosopher, a writer that people cared about and learned from, and I emulated the greats: Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Steinbeck, Poe, and Kerouac. Well, at least I tried to emulate them in my head but it never transferred to paper. The reality of who I was came knocking, and one thing that age will show without mercy is your limitations. I found I could not think or write like anyone else but me. I once pictured living in the mountains, climbing high peaks, and drinking filtered water from clear streams. Instead, I lived where I must.


Ages ago, in what seemed like a forever spring, I lived with a young woman who dreamed with me. When we were young, the years of work ahead did not seem so daunting: the bills, planning for retirement, and which furniture to place in a house. It appeared as if everything was ahead of us, the world ours, and we didn’t have a care. Where did it go? Perhaps, we fell into some of life’s great traps, conforming to living in the suburbs, getting a mortgage, car payments, and working for a salary that will never fully pay you for the time and mental energy that you put into it. It seems as if life became a series of next steps, climbing to the next goal, the next thing, and then overcome by screens that provide an avalanche of information that dull the brain and senses. The great social media and internet, the silencer of deep conversations. Oh, how I long for days when you had to face one another without distraction.


You can only be young once, free of the weight of responsibility that seemingly stacks on your shoulders until something breaks. Now you must fight for romance and time. You must secure your youthful energy in a vault and bring it out in an emergency, like a gentle kiss that lasts for the entire night. The envy I have of my youth was not having accumulated so many things, material, and internally, and that I had the freedom to just be.


But, would I ever want to be young again? The answer is a clear, “No.” I am now old enough to know the difference between what is false hope and what is reality. I know my truth, and I know where I have been, and have learned from it all. I have seen outward, and now that I have crossed the line of middle aged, I am taking a journey further in. It’s a place where I know what is important, what I value, and what matters. It’s where I can find understanding.


I do not mind growing older and adjusting to what my body can and cannot do. Being in my fifties has started to lead me towards who I truly am, my true self and true home, something that was hung out in the wind when I was young. My ego was too close to the surface to know myself the way I do now. I see so much more with blurred eyes. My internal vision has improved.


And at this age, I am still living with that woman I did so long ago, and many moments still feel new. It seems that we have once again started to search for the life we want to live, and maybe we can balance it all with what we must do and what we want to do. I appreciate looking back where we came from together, side-by-side, and thinking where we may be headed. I believe I have more hope now for the life I want to live than I did when I was twenty-five. As long as we keep the simple pleasures of being together as our priority, we will be alright. I want to assure my love of that.


I look forward to a time where I will let it all go, the tiring parts of myself that drain me, and focus on just being present. That is what I look forward to with aging because I know it is coming. I feel it. I know my youthful bottle is full so it will be tightened with a plastic cap, placed in a cellar, and one day it will be visited by the bottle of middle-age, old age, and then that final stage where I will look back on it all with great laughter knowing I did my best to live a life on my terms, and then I will take one last look at who sits beside me. It will be her, the girl from my youth, with her aged hands holding mine, and I'll tell her, "Thank you for giving me a wonderful life. See you soon my love."




110 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


© 2022 by Chuck Murphree

bottom of page