Bike that extra ten or twenty miles outside of town, hike a few clicks past the end of the trail map, and suddenly necessity kicks in. When you get a little lost out there, there’s only one job to do: you have to make it back.
Sore, tired, dried-out, sun-shocked — your complaints matter no more. Clarity settles in. The mind sharpens. Distractions are slayed by the hot sword of fatigue, honed by whispered fear as you chase the fading light.
I love that feeling.
My favorite arbitrary monument to summer adventure.
Honest necessity is in short supply these days. Drifting into the tail-end of my 40s, life is generally copacetic. The kids are doing their thing. The budget’s more or less balanced. There’s very little that I’m called on to do that can’t be done just as well by somebody else.
Music, writing, mid-level IT-consulting. Yeah, I do alright, but there’s always another guy out there sheathed in greater experience, or a new kid scooping up the opportunities, driven by the naive vroom of youthful vigor.
And as age starts to seep into my synapses and sinews, the inexorable slip downhill is clear. Dwell on that and soon it becomes far too easy to just sit one out, get a little comfy and push off another project ’til tomorrow.
I don’t think I’m alone. The utility of the grown-ass man ain’t what it used to be. A while back an old coot told me that the patriarch’s role was simply to “provide and protect.” While that has the ring of historical truth, it also betrays the current crisis.
Clearly, protection has lost its claim. In the absence of saber-toothed wildebeests and marauding warlords, the violent reflex is more liability than virtue. The civilized man has wisely outsourced his defenses to 911. Even if some jerk decides he wants to have a go, the safest path is to beguile him with conversation whilst awaiting rescue, wielding the weaponry of wit and charm.
Provision too is no longer the monopoly of men. The best jobs these days prize teamwork and EQ, usually filtered through endless pixel-pushing on tiny screens, tasks for which there is no testicular advantage.
Even when it comes to manufacturing — that noble Springsteenian redoubt of valiant labor — the future lies with nimble-fingered Filipinas lined up in lab coats assembling Apple-compatible gadgets, not burly steel smelters on the banks of the Monongahela. Raise your hand if your wife outearns you.
And although I’m glad that we’ve evolved as a society to this point — I’d never want to go back, surely to be sidelined to a swift tubercular grave, if not fodder for the phalanx — the path ahead is a flat tangle, a morass of unnavigable, conflicting possibilities.
So my advice, dear belly-spreading middle-aged men? Get back on the bike. Get a little lost out there. You might find that necessity will kick in once again. Do a wild favor for someone new. Heck, do something dumb. Something reckless. What have you got to lose? Run headlong to the edge of the map. There be dragons. I assure you.
