This post is a long time coming. There has been a standoff of sorts: on the blank screen, a cursor blinks repeatedly, expectant, eager, and daring. On the opposite side, I stare at it, unblinking. My fingers are poised over the keyboard, shoulders hunched as if leaning into the punch that will inevitably come. I resemble more an aged fighter trying to dodge a blow that can drop me than a blogger keen on sharing some of my words with the cyberworld.
People say it should be liberating to share with others one's sadness, happiness, worries and fears, life's big tragedies and small victories. Why then do I always find writing about myself scary? Daunting even! Like stripping all my clothes in front of a crowd of strangers. Actually, at my age, benuding myself in front of strangers is only moderately unpleasant, like arriving last at the packed nude beach. What truly terrifies me is opening my rib cage and exposing my heart to y'all. Because that's what I set out to do when I thought of starting a blog: I am leaving some sort of a trail, like a snail, a silvery and somewhat slimy mark that I passed by; a legacy to last at least as long as the server it's stored on.
I'm sixty. The number snuck up on me earlier this year, while I was busy living. Inside, it hasn't registered yet. Actually, inside my mind, time moves slowly, with a huge lag. I don't think I ever processed being fifty. Forty I was forced to acknowledge only because my back started behaving accordingly. It seized, pained, and bent me until I publicly conceded my age, while privately, the teenager living in my head held his fingers crossed behind his back. So — 60! I entered the decade in which my generation slowly starts dropping off. Small numbers at first, one or two this year, a few more the next, and so on. It will pick up the next decade, then we'll go off in droves.
There was no celebration. No cake. No bubbly drinks. I "celebrated" in bed, my foot elevated, recovering from the knee surgery a day before. It wasn't an old man's knee reconstruction, it was to fix a torn meniscus so I can run marathons again. I guess my body, just like my mind, isn't good at keeping time. We do things usually associated with people bearing much lower numbers in their "age" box.
It's only when a neighbour asked my age that I realized... Well, there's no way to dance around it. The fact is that there's much less time ahead of me than there's behind me. For a (very) long time I felt the urge to write, and for an equally long time I kept putting it off. When I felt more ambitious, I dreamt about writing a book. Or a few. Now that I'm more realistic (dare I say more mature?), I accept that a blog would be easier to accomplish. And here we are!
In the six decades, a lot has happened. It feels like every episode of my past was lived by a different person. Almost as if it was all a long TV series with a bunch of different actors changing in the leading role, while the 60-year-old me sat in a comfy chair and watched it unfolding in successive episodes. One was about an abusive childhood of a son of an alcoholic father. Another about the gangly youth who found escape in judo, letting the sport cure him of his natural shyness and insecurity. The third was about a young man who left judo coaching for a career as a war photographer. The fourth was about a photojournalist who immigrated to Canada, and miraculously found work there in his profession. Those are the main outlines of the story I lived, but there are many minor episodes with subplots, drama, character building, and spinoffs.
You see, there are stories to tell, stories to blog about. So, stick around while I slowly build my digital snail-trail.