A number of weeks before I turned twenty-eight I began to experience a kind of urgency.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that twenty-eight is only two years from thirty, or that twenty-seven is fairly close to twenty-five but twenty-eight is not. I began to feel that something wasn’t getting done quickly enough, that I had limited time (even a hundred years is such a small amount of time) and I had to move my ass to get where I was going. Something that couldn’t wait. Something important.
I began to feel that in my life I’d wasted far too many hours on deadening minutiae, and that I need to push hard to catch up. Twenty-two years until I’m fifty, I calculated. Forty-two until seventy. How healthy do I need to be to be pushing forward when I’m seventy and eighty and ninety? I need to be very healthy, I thought. And I simply haven’t come far enough to match the time I’ve used up. Time to move. Only two years until, what, the middle? The middle of what? Too far to go to be moving this slowly.
Who am I kidding? I felt this way long before I got anywhere near twenty-eight. But when I realized I was approaching twenty-eight, it got a lot worse.
When I tilt my head to one side, that all sounds like paranoid emotional workaholic crap. I hear that people have crises at thirty, so I should have one too. Here’s mine, and I’m an early bloomer! Isn’t it pretty?
When I tilt my head to the other side, I know that it’s absolutely true and I have to fucking get with it. There isn’t time for the kind of bullshit mainstream society engages as normal. There are things that need to happen now, and things that need to happen soon, and the clock is ticking on our ability to move them. If I sound like Keanu Reeves in some goddamn movie I guess you’ll just have to deal with it. This is how I feel.
It’s why when I see people sitting on their asses and languishing in the status quo it pisses me off.
It’s why I sometimes burn myself out because I forgot to (read: wasn’t willing to) take a real break. It’s why I get so frustrated when I seem to be slowed down, stalled out, becalmed or confused. Places to go. People to meet. Thoughts to hatch. Miracles to work. How can you just sit there? Aren’t you paying attention? We Americans, we’ve got it good. We can sit warm and cozy inside our fuzzy blanket of money and entitlement and instant gratification letting media and commerce jerk off our pleasure centers, and all the while we’re whining because we can’t quite get our way without expending some effort. Do I sound like a hippie or do I just sound mad?
How can we lay around distracting ourselves when there’s so much that we can do? Must do?
I just don’t understand.
No wonder I’m feeling urgency. I’m overcompensating for my culture.
But is it really overcompensation, or is it exactly what needs to be done?
