Time left to do

There are only so many tomorrows.

This is something you only really start to truly, fully understand with years. I've found that it's usually those that go through hard years that truly appreciate this, because - in my experience - years eventually become something felt, not simply lived past.

And there really is only so much time to do in a life; and you reach a point where you realise you can count, in one way or another, with whatever markers make the most sense in the moment, how much time you have left.

There's a cost to this knowledge, because it most often comes as a realization, in a moment bright with shock.

Possibly the best frame for this was captured in a documentary clip I've never found again since seeing it once, online; a man in his late 40s or thereabouts, in the foothills leading towards a mountain range in, I think, Montana. He was asked why he kept saddling his horse to head into the wilds for a week, two, three, more, each year, given how unforgiving the weather could be in that part of the state, and particularly as he would travel, just himself and his mount, and sleep almost in the open, in a sequence of public-use cabins or on the ground, bivouacking.

I don't now remember his exact response, but the weight of the sentiment, the knowledge it contained and expressed, remains heavy in my mind. It was something like this:

"I know that I'm 48 years old now. That means I'll only be able to do this maybe 12 more times - 12 years - before I can't physically do this again. Just twelve more summers, maybe, before I can't."

For me, now, at this point in my own life, there's a weight of meaning to this that is by turns frightening and, strangely, also simply to be accepted.

I have maybe 2, maybe 3 more 'life moves' within reach, by which I mean the uprooting of myself from here to go there; to adjust to a new place, whether in a different city or a different country is exhausting, and expensive. These are gambles for the young, and I no longer have a gambler's tolerance for risk.

I have maybe 1, maybe 2 more mistakes I can make, before ruin. Friendships lost, let drift, broken, or abandoned have a 'cost in the carrying' later in life. Their edges become sharper in the quiet times, and profoundly more so for those who treated their days as a race, a sequence of gambles.

And I have maybe 1 great happiness left in me to share, maybe. The weight of those mountains, seen distantly, creates a gravity I can feel across the years in front of me, a clarity pressed into the question 'is there enough left?'

- - -

The memory of that one, small clip remains with me, heavy with personal meaning, years later. There are mountains in the distance, and there's a saddling-up to be done, a preparation to be made with those mountains in sight.

Firstly, that, yes, there are only so many years left now; only so many seasons in which we will be able to do. Our bodies give out, slow down, stop working as well as they did yesterday, or last year, or way back when. The machinery of us wears out, no matter how well-maintained. Those sprains, the small breaks, the injuries, twists and tears, and especially the worse of those batterings that an active life gives you, will bite you later in life; and progressively the jaws of age that deliver those bites become stronger.

Secondly, those things that we love - because they have meaning to us - we will feel them pass; we will watch them go, eventually, and we will grieve. The tracks they'll leave will be our own private trail of tears.

Third, we will lose chances, opportunities, to do before it's too late. There will be things that we always - always, throughout our lives - believed we would do, which we will learn, in a moment, that we will never now do. Things cherished in thought, things held close, things assumed - gone, but remembered with the pain of loss.

And we'll have to face those things lost, and feel the shock of understanding that they are gone, while we are yet here, holding to them.

And leave them behind, somehow.