Three Hours in the Yard

Recently I woke up in the middle of the night with what I was absolutely certain was a profound thought about getting older. Half asleep, I grabbed my phone and sent a text to myself before drifting back off.

In the morning I looked at what I had written. It said: “Wait a minute I am how old. Age ageing in the world where it’s everybody else’s fault how do I get Ol.”

I have no idea what “how do I get Ol” means. For that matter, I’m not entirely sure what the rest of it means either, but I do remember the feeling behind it.

I think the thought that woke me up was this: at some point you look around and realize something strange about getting older. The number itself isn’t the surprising part. The surprising part is that the world around you sometimes seems to be getting younger and more childish at the same time.

I’m not saying our generation had everything figured out. We didn’t. We made our share of mistakes and then some. But somewhere along the line the cultural default seemed to shift from figuring things out to explaining why things aren’t our fault.

I’m not interested in complaining about that. Every generation has its habits and blind spots. What I’m more interested in is the question that was probably hiding inside my late-night note. How do you grow older in a world like this?

For most of my life the answer seemed obvious. You work. You take responsibility. You move things forward. You climb the ladder, build the company, raise the family, keep the train moving down the track. If something breaks, you fix it. If something goes wrong, you deal with it. Momentum becomes the default setting.

I used to tell the people who worked for me something I heard years ago. Take time to sharpen your saw. Step away once in a while. Everything will still be there when you get back. It was good advice. I just rarely followed it myself.

Saturday something simple happened that reminded me of that old line. I had a roof rack to install on the car. One of those jobs that should take about twenty minutes if you know what you’re doing. I do not know what I’m doing.

It was one of those early spring afternoons. About sixty-seven degrees, a light breeze moving through the yard. The dogs were wandering around nearby and D was working in the garden while I stood there studying a collection of brackets and bolts that somehow had to turn into a roof rack.

Earlier I had put a bottle of local Sauvignon in the refrigerator, planning to open it once the rack was installed. Considering the job was supposed to take about twenty minutes, the timing should have worked out perfectly.

What followed was three hours of standing out in the yard in the sunlight, wrestling with brackets and bolts and instructions that might as well have been written by a Swedish riddle master.

I’m not particularly handy, so naturally I turned a simple job into a small engineering project. But somewhere in the middle of it something unexpected happened.

For three hours I wasn’t sitting behind a computer. I wasn’t trying to write something, launch something, optimize something, or move the next project forward. I was standing outside in the air, in the sunlight, working through a problem with my hands.

And at the end of those three hours, I felt strangely good. Part of it was the small satisfaction of figuring out something I’m not naturally good at. But the bigger surprise was realizing how much I had enjoyed the time itself. For three hours I hadn’t been trying to move my life forward. I had just been living it.

When I finally walked back inside, the Sauvignon I had put in the refrigerator earlier to celebrate the finished project was definitely ready.

Most of us spend the early part of our lives pushing. Careers to build. Families to support. Responsibilities to carry. There’s always another hill to climb and another deadline waiting at the top.

You go on vacation once in a while, but even then there’s a sense that the clock is ticking. Soon enough you’ll be back in the office, back in the routine, back in motion. Momentum becomes the habit of a lifetime. But maybe getting older changes the equation a little.

Maybe the privilege of reaching the fourth quarter of life is realizing that not every hour has to be optimized. Not every afternoon needs to produce something measurable. Not every moment has to move the ball ten yards down the field.

Maybe some afternoons can simply be spent standing in the yard in the sunlight, trying to figure out why the bracket won’t line up with the hole it’s supposed to fit into.

We spend the first three quarters of life being responsible for everyone else. Our families. Our work. Our obligations. The long list of things that depend on us showing up and doing the job. Maybe the fourth quarter is when we’re finally allowed to be a little responsible for ourselves.

That doesn’t mean giving up or slowing down or retreating from the world. It just means remembering that the reason we worked so hard to build a life was so we could actually live it.

I still don’t know what I meant when I wrote “how do I get Ol.” But I’m starting to think it might have meant something like this.

Maybe growing older simply means realizing that once in a while you’re allowed to step outside, stand in the sunlight, and spend three hours doing something that doesn’t move anything forward at all. Except you.