Ruminating in the Wee Hours: What HAVE I Done With This Life?

You're Too Old to Spend the Rest of Your Life on the Couch: Let's Adventure!

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Thursday, May 28, 2026, 2:15 am: Mika’s restless.

For the last six weeks we’ve been sharing a bed on the floor of my bedroom in a house that is increasingly empty as I sell off, give away or donate everything in preparation for imminent overseas departure.

Her beloved queen bed is gone, and she’s having a hard time sharing the floor with Mom. I don’t blame her. So at 2 am she woke up, shook, wandered the room with her dog tags jingling.

Two am. I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Finally she curled up against my stomach while I put my hand on her warm belly. We lay like that for a while, as I struggled to go back to dreaming.

There’s too much to think about.

Tomorrow my house lands in new hands. Monday I drive to Portland, with any luck at all, after a final weekend on the Pacific Northwest Coast to say goodbye to my beloved sunsets.

Hard to say what will happen especially after months of completely unexpected mishaps, delays, problems, complications and utter messes as caused by incompetence on my part or everyone else’s or both.

What kind of life have I had, really? Where are all the accomplishments?

What stands as a statement of my having been on this earth?

Who gets to judge that, anyway? Who makes up standards by which anyone is believed to have lived a worthy life?

Photo by Eyasu Etsub on Unsplash

My friend Melissa and I have spoken about this plenty of times, this business of human be-ing vs human do-ing, the latter being our compulsive nature to achieve no matter what it costs.

We mock cultures unwilling to sacrifice their families and bodies on the altars of achievement without bothering to ask, until too late, whether or not the greatest achievement is simply being able to appreciate the incredible gift of life we’re given.

We see, share and discuss memes about slowing down, seeing, smelling, noticing, then we notch up the speed to make up for that guilty pleasure of taking in a blossom with a bumblebee working the pollen.

We feel guilty for such pleasures. My hand is way up here. It took me until I was nearly seventy before I was able to give myself Hump Days on the Coast, a midweek break in a lifetime habit of working six to seven days a week. Forever.

As the minutes tick by not only towards my imminent departure for a culture which does not share our toxic relationship with time but also towards the end of my life, I get to think about all these things.

What makes a good life?

Is it not enough just to get to a point where we stop trying so damned hard to be relevant or important and simply learn to notice, enjoy and appreciate the world we’ve been given? Hardly a new question. We just don’t always apply it to ourselves.

Saturday, May 30, 2026 11 am: Lincoln City, Oregon

Mika watches for sea monsters as she waits for Mom to get the hell off the computer and take her for a walk. I’m waiting for my third coffee to transit the body so that I can take her for a walk.

Meanwhile I get to stare out over the Pacific after the first night’s sleep on a bed in two months. We rarely consider how fortunate we are.

While we in America obsess about mattress quality and sleep numbers, some 2-3 billion folks, including most of our homeless, have no bed at all. In many countries a bed is a burden, a futon or hammock vastly preferred. That said, this 73 yo body appreciated last night’s soft bed for a change. My mood improved as a result.

So did selling the house.

My friend Melissa asked me yesterday how I felt about that.

Closing was at 8:30 am. Happened without fanfare or drama, over in minutes. Then I shot out the door and was back finishing all the chores: these boxes to UPS, those to storage, this last item to consignment, run run run run run.

No time to think or feel. Just do do do do do until finally, with some sweat on my brow and grey lowering clouds threatening to the west where I was about to head, I pulled the storage unit’s door down for the last time, locked it and my dog and I drove away.

We are so busy doing we forget to figure out how we feel.

Again my hand is WAY up here.

When I left the house, I stood on the landing, looked at the place I had lived these last nearly six years, and said thank you in the echoing void. I meant it.

But I couldn’t wait to get out.

My house, as beautiful as it was, had become a pitcher plant.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Beautiful, sticky, deadly to an active life. Once you crawl in and get comfy, you might not ever come out.

Photo by Rapha Wilde on Unsplash

I’d had my dream house. Seventeen-foot ceilings, high stone fireplace, fir forest right up to the deck, gorgeous and quiet and full of life. Close to the coast. Wood and beams and pretty colors and pileated woodpeckers and rain and fog and mist. My absolute dream palace.

The perfect pitcher plant of a place.

I’ve never loved a home so much. It was the perfect place to heal from many surgeries. It’s not the place for now. It isn’t just that the sheer upkeep of the house means that there’s no room in my life for much of anything other than home maintenance. That’s to say nothing of how hard it’s been to create a community of friends here, a fact that truly surprised me.

In a few years, even basic maintenance would be impossible due to the rapidity of rising costs. You still have to eat, you still have to pay for gas, facts of life that for millions of us are becoming untenable.

People have written to say that if they had loved a place so much, they wouldn’t have left. I agree, but for this: the cost to stay vastly outweighed the cost to go. It all depends on the life you want to live.

What makes a well-lived life? For me, it’s one full of discomfort. That’s where I get to grow, be challenged, learn the most about what I can do. What I am really capable of, especially physically and as I age.

Comfort is anathema to the life I want to live. It prevents growth, stunts evolution and is addictive. Nothing wrong with a bit of comfort- like that motel bed last night- but I yearn for sleeping bags and tents.

I just had six years as a homebody, which was perfect for what I needed to do: heal from a very damaging relationship and get all my injuries and physical issues addressed so that I could return to what I love.

In living at this gorgeous house I watched how often it was easier to stay home vs. go for a walk, stay home vs. get to the gym, stay home vs….whatever. Even though I knew I needed to do all those things, I watched how physical pain and surgical recovery gave me the perfect excuse to stay home and rest.

A bad one, too. The faster I was up and around the faster I recovered. And did. But boy did I get comfortable with more time at home looking at the gorgeousness than going out and exploring more.

Nothing wrong with that. Fine for the short term, especially with another surgery in a few months. Fourteen total over seven years. Too easy to say, wait til after the next one.

Fly in the pitcher plant.

I did work out. I did do the PT. I did all the things necessary to get healthy again, but a part of me had gotten remarkably lazy.

Honestly, I didn’t see it until I was heading west at a gentle 55 mph, my doggo’s head on my hand, tasting freedom which was blowing into all four open windows in my car.

I felt like I’d just broken out of my chrysalis. Been a while since I felt that unencumbered.

On Tuesday the car goes into perma-storage. I go on perma-adventure. That’s full of utter unknowns, future faceplants, fuckups, failures and flops. Guaran-damn-teed.

Two Substack writers whose work appeals precisely because it addresses this very thing are Brad Stulberg and Michael Easter. Worth looking at their books and their articles. They poke at the things which threaten to cost us the life we yearn for.

Comfort is the easy way out, that soft recliner vs the long walk.

Comfort is seductive. More times than I want to admit I stood in my heartbreakingly gorgeous yard and asked myself,

REALLY FUCKING REALLY????

I choose discomfort, challenge and the potential for a thousand more great stories before the waters carry me home.

Photo by Laura Barry on Unsplash

Before you bark at me….

There are no shoulds stated or implied in this article. There is nothing about how you need to do what I’m doing. Not at all. This is my journey, a point of exquisite freedom reached after long rumination and hard choices.

This is what works for me and me only.

How you live, how you age is up to you. I only wish for all of us to ask if there is a life we want that we are giving up for relative comfort.

You may not want to ask. You may.

If you do, I hope that line of inquiry takes you somewhere wonderful. I am convinced mine will. Already has.

Let’s play.

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Thank you as always to my subscribers and my readers. I’ve been utterly buried these last months with packing, preparation, last minute disasters and details. Still not over with, but at least I had a blessed few hours to catch up. Please consider supporting my work; it not only means a lot but it really has kept the lights on these many years.