Fifty Wasn't Supposed to Look Like This
If you'd shown us a picture at thirty of what our lives would look like at fifty, neither of us would have believed you. Actually, we'd probably have had questions. Why are we living in an RV? Why do we own forty acres in the Arizona high desert? Why is there a shipping container sitting among the junipers? Why are there solar panels on the ground? Why are we making candles? Why are we filming ourselves doing all of this and putting it on the internet? And perhaps most confusing of all, when exactly did we become grandfathers?
Fifty used to sound old. Not old old, because even when you're twenty you understand intellectually that fifty-year-olds aren't waiting around to die. But it sounded established. Settled. Like an age by which you would have arrived at whatever your life was eventually going to become. You'd have the career, the house, the retirement account, the routines, and enough accumulated wisdom to stop making questionable decisions. There was something about fifty that seemed to belong firmly on the other side of youth, somewhere beyond the part of life where you were still figuring things out.
Then we turned fifty.
We would like to report that the wisdom arrived as scheduled.
It did not.
What did arrive was the strange realization that the number we'd spent decades thinking of as somewhere far out in the future was suddenly describing us. Both of us. Somehow Jon and I have been together since 1997, our hair has acquired opinions of its own about where it would like to grow and where it would prefer to stop, getting up from the floor occasionally requires more planning than it used to, and apparently operating an unusually stubborn hand tool can now leave us sore for five days. Yet internally, neither of us feels particularly different from the people we were yesterday.
That's one of the first surprises of turning fifty. You don't cross some invisible line and suddenly become the person you imagined a fifty-year-old would be. You wake up and you're still you. You still laugh at stupid things. You still get irritated about things that don't matter. You still make plans you're not entirely sure will work. You still occasionally make decisions that cause you to look at each other later and ask why the hell you thought that was a good idea. The only real difference is that now you have fifty years of evidence suggesting this may simply be your personality.
When we were younger, we imagined life as something that gradually narrowed as you got older. Not necessarily in a depressing way. It just seemed logical. Your twenties were for figuring things out. Your thirties were for building something. Your forties were when you became established. By fifty, surely most of the big decisions had been made. You'd know where you lived, what you did, who your people were, and roughly what the rest of the road looked like. Maybe you'd change jobs or move somewhere, but the broad architecture of your life would be in place.
For a while, ours seemed to be.
We had built a life in Lake Placid that we genuinely loved. We had a beautiful home, careers we enjoyed, family nearby, friends, routines, financial stability, and all the things that would have made it perfectly reasonable to continue along the same path. If someone had looked at our lives from the outside, there wasn't an obvious problem waiting to be solved. We weren't unhappy. We weren't trying to escape anything. We had simply begun wondering whether the life we'd built was the only version of our lives we wanted to experience.
We know where that question eventually led.
At an age when we probably should have been becoming increasingly settled, we sold nearly everything we owned and moved into an RV.
Apparently we misunderstood the assignment.
