The Last Five Yards

Why is the last 5% of life change so difficult?

“I have wasted my life.” – James Wright

“You must change your life.” - Rilke

On Monday, I turned fifty-nine, effectively beginning the sixth decade of my life. It’s a chance to take stock, see what I’ve learned, and try to dispel my cynical belief that people get old but don’t grow up or out of anything. What we imagined when young about some progressive path toward reward and redemption turned out to be just a big downward slide toward entropy and death.

“People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste.”

― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I write during a challenging week in which I question if I have made any progress at all. I remain the anxious person I was at sixteen, making mountains out of molehills and freaking out about trivial things that other people might call normal life.

But there are a couple of areas in which I might have changed.

The biggest might be self-discipline. Though a parallel awareness makes me painfully aware of where my discipline needs improvement. This does not mean I can’t see the many fruits of my labor.

Twenty years ago, I got things done by sheer determination, using vast chunks of time at all hours of the day, often late at night. HowWasTheShow was a labor of love equal in size to my day job and was built almost entirely out of whiskey and adrenaline. In a few weeks, after twenty-one years, I am preparing to close it down and archive its thousands of posts.

I could never build something like that now. The behavior that it required — the drinking and going to shows — runs counter to what makes sense at this phase of life. The rock and roll lifestyle calls for an unhealthy set of habits, and it kept me up too late. I was always tired. Long term, it was untenable.

As I enter my sixth decade, I manage large tasks in regularized small chunks, born of the necessity of having a family as well as a full-time job. This Substack is part of the result. This week marks twenty-one weeks in a row of publishing, a statistic which apparently puts me in the top 13% of Substackers. No small feat!

It's as much work as writing a weekly newspaper column. Every week this year, while welcoming my first son and facing potential layoffs at my day job, I got it done. (Fortunately, it gets easier due to habit, practice, and doing it in small chunks.)

For the past four years, I have gotten up around 6:30 at the latest to read and write. It’s another small habit that has had a dramatic impact. It has allowed the production of considerable writing material (fiction, poetry, essays, journal entries) and the reading of more books for pleasure than in any year since I was a student and could read all day in the summertime.

Imagine if I’d developed this habit at the age of fifteen. Or seventeen. Or even thirty-seven! I might have become President of the World. Or of the Universe!

This change started in my mid-fifties before I started pursuing my master’s degree, but those studies solidified my practice of rising early. With small children, I would not be reading my evenings away, so mornings it was, sitting on the exercise bike at 6 a.m., combining exercise and reading. The spring before my first MFA program started, I read Moby Dick on that bike, reading on my Kindle while listening to the audiobook. The heft of the book was less threatening since all digital books appear physically to be the same size.

My health started to take a hit in my mid-fifties as well, another life change that required management. My knees started giving out (torn meniscus in each). I had back stiffness which meant I needed to be careful about what I lifted. I was diagnosed with polyneuropathy in my feet, which on my doctor’s advice, prompted me to drink far less if at all. But it was yet another part of self-actualization. With few bad habits left, my awareness grows to focus on what’s left. Suddenly, I care more about what used to be small things.

I’ve heard it said that the last 5% of a lot of a project is the hardest, the last five yards if you’ll permit the tired metaphor. The endzone is so close I can taste the painted letters on the grass. But fatigue and burnout have set in. There are diminishing returns, unlike the substantial gains I got when making big changes earlier in life. (Quitting smoking, for example.)

Fine-tuning can be complex. You face the fear of failure and the fear of success. What if you get done and you’re still not happy? And then there are the existential questions of what then? We’re all still going to die.

I'd never had a problem with my weight until my late forties, another difficult area of fine-tuning. Lately, I’ve been fighting with the five kilos I have wanted to lose for years. I know it can be done, but day after day month after month the scale doesn’t budge. I know why, but I feel helpless against how effectively the ice cream manufacturers have managed to promote their products to people like me.

But I want to change the last few things I don’t like about myself.

And I want to do it because I want to be there for others. Now that I’ve solved most of the big problems in my own life, I want to support my children, my wife, and my friends. What’s the point of getting your shit together if you’re not going to help others? Secure your oxygen mask first, as the airplane emergency reminder goes.

It's not too late. Even if by the average life expectancy for my gender, ethnicity, and social status (75 years), I have about 15 years left, and I intend to make the most of them. And I’m grateful every day that both my parents have already blasted ten years each past that average.

As I approach sixty, I feel I know what I need to do. And I feel like I am 95 % of the way there.

I can’t remember who said it or in what context, but “Whatever you find most difficult to do is what you came into this world to correct.”

If the difficulty of these last few yards is any indication, they are likely the most important of them all.