Losing Your Spark

    I don’t know when it happens. I don’t know when the adventure of life slowly fades and is replaced by the repetitive and mundane. Over the last few years, I have slowly started feeling this way. I feel like my spark has faded and been lost.

    It is hard for me to tell if this is just a part of the ‘mid-life crisis’ that comes when you get deep into your 40s. Or perhaps this feeling of malaise and being lost has its roots in the series of unfortunate events that have dotted my last several years.

    When you lose a loved one, it changes you. When you lose several in rapid succession, it does irreparable damage. Your brain and heart don’t get a chance to process one loss, and another comes rushing in to knock you upside the head. And how do you process such losses when you feel like you have nobody to talk to about them?

    At this point in time, I feel like I have two types of people in my life. Ones who listen to me like they're listening to the ‘on hold’ music waiting for a real conversation to begin. Then there are the ones who simply cannot just listen. Any conversation devolves into a pissing contest over whose problems are worse. That usually ends with me deferring to them and just putting my problems, which we never come back to, on the back burner.

    But what of the spark? That zest for life, that yearning for the future. What happens to it? Some people seemingly never run out of fuel for that spark. Others, like me, are just staring at a cold fire pit, wondering where the lighter fluid is.



    When I was a teenager in the 1990s, the spark raged out of control. I was full of the angst that the Grunge movement and my own childhood had instilled in me. I was fighting for my future. I was working hard to do well in school so that I could have the future I wanted. I was planning on that future with friends, many of whom are still big parts of my life to this day. I was bound and determined to make it and filled with the energy to prove it. My apologies to 16-year-old me.

    When I was in my 20s in the 2000s, the spark was lit by an unending need for change. I did whatever I needed to do to find my path. If I had to leave a job that I felt was unfulfilling, I did it. If I had to move across the country a time or two, I packed my bags. I was lucky enough to find the love I had craved since I was a boy. I was also unfortunate enough to find that things like time and distance cannot always sustain love. Unflinching, I pressed on. I knew that each door that closed meant my future lay behind another one I had yet to find. I knew that risk-taking was the only way to truly change things. My apologies to 26-year-old me.

    When I was in my 30s in the 2010s, the spark engulfed me in the need for success and acceptance. The future I had dreamed of as a teenager felt like a raft attached to a slippery rope that I was slowly losing hold of. 

    What was success? What was love? The definitions changed with age. I wanted to be a published author, and that happened, now nine times over. Yet it didn’t lead to being a self-sustaining career. 

    I wanted to change day jobs so that I could at least feel fulfilled while waiting for my ship to come in. I did that, and yet my dissatisfaction only grew and festered. No matter the good that came to me, I was never fully happy. I was in the best shape of my life physically, but on the inside, I always felt not enough. I wanted to be as big as possible and yet still go as unnoticed as possible. That spark turned to an inward anger that burned me up and wore me out. My apologies to 36-year-old me.

    Now in my 40s in the 2020s, the spark lay dormant. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am still bound and determined to find the path I am meant to be on. Now it is far quieter and reserved, and cautious. It feels as though those losses I've suffered, 6 people in 5 years, have snuffed the spark out.

    There is no more teenage angst, though I wish there were. 16-year-old me would have a thing or two to say about my current mindset. 

    There is no more taking risks like you’re trying on a new shirt. I now worry more about the potential problems than the potential rewards. Maybe that comes with age, but 26-year-old me would tell me much of what my life consists of now is due to the risks I took back then. 

    There is no more ‘me against the world’ level of needing to prove myself. Shouting from the rooftops about who I am sounds like more effort than it’s worth these days. 36-year-old me would likely ask, ‘What in the world was everything we did for then?’

    These days, I feel like I packed all of my hopes and dreams onto the back of a snail and am watching it try to cross a busy highway. All of the various incarnations of myself would likely be shaking their heads for different reasons. Yet inside, I am still all of those people. There are times when I feel myself slipping into those old mindsets. But I feel like the ‘older and wiser’ version of me overrules them all. It says ‘Why push a sled full of rocks uphill when you can sail down a lazy river if both routes lead to the same destination?’

    Maybe in my 50s in the 2030s, I’ll look back on this and laugh because I found my spark again. Maybe I’ll apologize to the current version of me for something I haven’t even done yet. The spark inside you isn’t something tangible. It is a feeling, a movement, a driving force meant to get you through the journey we call life. It is also something that, if not cultivated and nurtured, can be lost. I will keep on looking for mine, and if you are looking for yours, know that you’re not the only one.

Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #44: Hydraulic Press, Bird’s Nest Hair, Bot Fights, etc.

 

1. Social media learns your interests and crafts your algorithm to show you more of that stuff. I don’t know how it happened but my Facebook Reels suggestions for several weeks have been nothing but a hydraulic press crushing various objects. I’ve seen bowling balls, candles, wood, action figures, and more get flattened. I find it fun and satisfying, and obviously, as I keep watching them the algorithm will keep showing me more but I still don’t know how it started.

2. It was the tale of 2 cute kids at the supermarket one night this week. One little girl, probably 3, was running up and down all of the aisles with her mother trying to keep up with her. I found myself playing traffic cop once, alerting the mother of where her child had gone. The other little girl, probably also 3, was so excited to help her grandmother scan items at the self-checkout that she caused the machine to shut down several times. The attendant had to repeatedly come over to reset the machine. I thought both were cute, the adults watching these kids were not as amused as me though.

3. So often over the last several years I feel in my life that I have totally lost the road. It is as if I am crossing a rickety bridge in the fog and I am not even sure what’s on the other side. I’m just hoping that whatever it is it’s worth moving toward. There are plenty of times I feel I need to stop moving and take a serious look at my surroundings, but then the fear of wasting more time overtakes me and I start sprinting in the darkness. I don’t know if this is how my mid-life crisis is manifesting itself. What I do know is that I’ll keep moving forward until I find whatever I’m chasing or until I collapse.

How life feels at times.

4. A really fun thing to have happen is to pull into a parking space after dark. Then you open your car door to step out and on the ground is a mass of god knows what. Some was liquid, some was mushy, and all of it was gross. To top it off I had to do a kind of ballet dance to get around it. Not sure if I totally missed stepping in it. That was not a good time.

5. On the roads to some beaches on Cape Cod, and I’m sure other places, some signs show you how to proceed if you’re not in a vehicle. They say: Walk Right, Ride Left. That makes sense if you’re going in one direction. What about if you’re going the other way? When you walk right and ride left isn’t it on the opposite side? Doesn’t that make it basically anarchy on these roads? The sign should just say: Walk wherever, ride wherever, as long as you’re not in the middle of the road. These types of thoughts and observations are Exhibit A of why I say my life is like a Seinfeld episode some days.

6. My introversion paid off a bit. I stopped for a few quick things at a convenience store. I grabbed them and immediately went for the self-checkout register located in between a pair of regular registers. This was so I could get in and out without a lot of small talk that I’m not particularly a big fan of. The employee that was working had stepped away momentarily to straighten up one of the aisles. They were so grateful that I could check myself out rather than make them stop their work and come back. I decided to take that win and not say it was because I didn’t want to interact with anyone.

7. At my work there was a fun message I came into one morning. We have an automated away message that is sent to people who text after hours. It just thanks them for the message and states our hours. I walked in with 48 unread messages from one specific number which was alarming at first. I mean who would text us 48 times overnight, right? It turns out that the message that came in was automated, and then we responded with our automated message, which then triggered the same message again from the source. You can see where this is going. It was two bots responding to each other repeatedly. I couldn’t stop laughing once I realized the absurdity of it.

This is how I imagined the bots interacting.

8. Those who used to read the original Initial Impressions blog back in 2010-2012 will remember my attempts to get 5-Hour Energy to sponsor my road trips. I mentioned it numerous times in the old blogs. Now there’s a new version of this energy shot called 5-Hour Energy Sport which I guess is different than the regular because it’s supposed to be a pre-workout. Anyway, I enjoy it but again it has me wondering how to get them to sponsor my road trips. Maybe I’ll keep mentioning them in the video version of this blog. Or maybe I should actually start doing more road trips before I look for a sponsor?

9. In keeping with the feeling lost, Mid-Life Crisis theme I am trying to shake things up with small changes in my life. Switching from Pandora to Spotify for my music app. Quitting Twitter/X and going to Bluesky. Growing my hair out a bit. It’s only been a few days of all of this but it does feel a little new and rejuvenating. I believe a series of smaller tweaks in life can be just as impactful as packing up and moving cross country. I mean I already did that, twice.

10. Speaking of growing hair out my plan is for it to be only slightly longer. When my hair is long it is not straight or curly, it is like a bird’s nest which I hate. I have been routinely shaving my head since 2010. With few exceptions, this has been a weekly occurrence. On the odd occasion when I have grown my hair out people are shocked that I actually have a full head of hair and don’t shave it because I am going bald. Unfortunately now in my late 40s, I can already see after a few weeks of growing it that my hair is far more gray and white than I remembered. I’m not going to dye it though, I might as well age with dignity. Plus I can always just shave it off again in a few months.  

My hair will not be as long as it was here in 2019.

Initial Impressions 2.0 #8: Younger Self, Bike Trail Police, A Fistful of Supplements, etc.

#8: Younger Self

1. I have been recently wondering if it was possible to go back in time 30 years and talk to my 16-year-old self how that would go. If I told myself what I had done, what I had been through, and what I had accomplished thus far in life would my younger self tell me he was proud of me? Or would he ask me what the hell happened to me? I wish time travel was real because I honestly don’t know what the answer would be.

2. I bought a small pumpkin for Halloween in the second week of October. Here we are nearing the end of March and it is still going strong. I’m torn between getting rid of it soon, or waiting it out and seeing just how long this pumpkin will last. At least it’ll pass Easter no problem.

The pumpkin in its younger days in October 2023.

3. It wouldn’t be Cape Cod if the weather didn’t immediately get colder and more rainy as soon as the calendar said it was spring. Sure we could have blooming flowers but here, have cold drizzle and fog, that’s way better.

4. It will always be funny to me the amount of people who go through self-checkout in any store and get super irritated at the machine when they do something wrong. I want to suggest they go to a register with an actual human since self-checkout is obviously too much for them, but then I’d miss them swearing and slamming items down.

The anger is real.

5. If a dog owner picks up their dog’s crap and puts it in a bag but then leaves the bag on the ground have they really cleaned it up? By that logic, I should be able to leave bags of trash everywhere as long as the trash is in the bag.

6. Parts of the bike trails on Cape Cod now have 15mph speed limit signs. Yes, speed limit signs on a bike trail. Yes, I get it, kids and families use the trails and shouldn’t have to worry about people whizzing by super fast. But, if someone is ‘speeding’ on the bike trail what exactly happens to them? Are there bike trail police that will pull you over? I haven’t seen any yet if there are.

The chase is on.

7. A common phrase I find myself saying over the last few years is ‘I can’t believe (blank) was (how ever many) years ago.’ It must be the mid-life crisis talking. I wonder if someday I’ll say I can’t believe how long ago I wrote this blog.

8. I saw one of the absolute worst people ever at Market Basket. This old angry jerk yelled at a woman for going down the ‘wrong side’ of the aisle, then proceeded to call her a ‘woman driver.’ Then in the next aisle over he yelled at a man for ‘blocking the aisle’ as he was in the process of shopping. This scumbag was with a woman too who just let him harass everyone he encountered. I hope someone punches his lights out.

9. In my teens I’d pour a pile of M&M’s into my hand to get a sugar rush. In my mid-40s I pour a pile of vitamins & supplements into my hand just so that I can feel halfway decent. It’s more funny than anything because even though I think I am in much better shape than the vast majority of people my age I still need my multi, glucosamine, fish oil, probiotics, vitamin C, etc.

Sad but true

10. Getting old really sneaks up on you. One day you’re going off crazy jumps on your BMX bike, the next day you’re buying socks and a new broom and being very happy at that fact. Boy, life comes at you fast.

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