Settle Season
Is the tough part of life over? And turning point decisions I've made in the past.
I’m been wondering lately: is the hard part of life over? I mean, for many of the people in my cohort, it seems like forties is the time when you’ve gotten most of your ducks in a row and lined up—for lack of a better term, “you’ve got your shit together.” Your career has advanced to somewhere, you’re living where you want to live (more or less), and perhaps you’re with your partner for life. Maybe you have a family, maybe you have a valued pet, something like that. Short of illness—personally or in your family and friends—it seems like the hard part of growing up and getting settled is over.
What big milestones, aspirations, goals to accomplish lay ahead? Sure, this-aged could be a time for reinvention, and if you’re an artist of some sort, being mid-forties can still be the beginning of your career. But for the mostly regular folk I’m around, it seems like the tumultuous waves of life have passed, if at least for a decade or two.
So what now?
If the twenties and thirties were about struggle—all relative, of course—people have seemingly mostly made their choices, set their paths, and can choose to be insulated from what they want to be insulated from. There’s a sense of a plateau reaching far into the distance. Sure, there’s always accumulation, there’s subtraction or trimming down, and there’s always some changes here and there, but broadly speaking, people are settled.
Does this sentiment ring true for you? Maybe not, as I’m extrapolating a lot here, but I’d be curious to hear your thoughts about it.
For me, I’m thinking about what the next decade might look like. I used to have this system of rating how life was going, with the five categories being something like health, wealth, family, friends, relationship. I might have subbed health in for something there. Regardless, my current ranking in all those categories are a solid four, if not an outright five. I’m at my peak, statistically speaking!
But there has to be more right? I’m just wondering what that is... Personally I’m hoping that I have one more big overseas adventure ahead of me. We went out this past weekend, to a dance thing, and I told George and our other friend that I wanted one more season of hard partying and exploring. Crawling the streets of some metropolis, finding new things and people and experiences.
And then I can socially retire.
During one of our recent relationship meetings—which we call “Weather Reports”—Sachi asked what were some turning point decisions I’d made. My two answers were “leaving college early to go to New York” and “moving to Taiwan.” I hope there will be a third ahead, as movement seems like a good theme to pick up again.
And to expand on those two answers. It wasn’t the actual dropping out of college that was impactful—which I’m sure it was, employment wise—but I think it was the first in a long subsequent series of “decisions I made for myself”, and often ill-thought out and ill-prepared for. The pattern that emerged was: I get my attention caught up in something, I dive all the way in, and then I decide rather quickly that I must follow this spark and need to do it now now now. I don’t have the patience to set anything up and instead push hard to make it happen as quickly as possible, whatever “it” is.
In this case, it was “I’m super into film and video making stuff” and “I need to get to New York!” My focus on everything I’d been doing before just vanished, and I pivoted hard to the new thing. I somehow convinced my parents to allow this big change to happen and I was off to the big city.
It was a similar story with Taiwan. I went there for ten days, decided on the last night of my visit that I wanted to move there, finagled circumstances with my mom, and then arrived back in Taipei within a month.
This was pretty much a through line for most of my adult life, encompassing jobs and of course, relationships. Get a thought in my head, follow it, and leave a wake trailing behind… And see, both of these decisions worked out great! Of course, I’m overlooking the times when that kind of impromptu life decision didn’t work out, but I’ll have to think about those circumstances in another post.
Mostly, I feel like this kind of “wait for the inspiration moment” set me up for seeking out the right feeling for when I needed to get moving and do something. But was that actually good? I mean, you only get that feeling every so often, and it’s not really a sustainable way to live life, right?
The next big decision will certainly be planned I think, and that could be the first!
The Month in Review
And September wrapped around right quick! I think the last Week in Review was at the beginning of the month so I better just briefly cover the past few weeks while we’re about to head into fall.
Surfing season lasted a bit longer than expected, with the water still remaining warm and big waves—relative for San Diego, which was four to five feet—arriving just last week. I also taught two people how to boogie board, visitors from Oregon and Japan, and I encourage more people to come down here and learn how to boogie board with me. It’ll only take fifteen minutes to get going and you’ll feel the push of the ocean and the huge grin on your face when you glide in.
Also, I must remark on a dolphin sighting, our closest one ever. We were just drifting around and Sachi saw a pod of them and immediately paddled toward them, as she is brave and fearless. I went after them too, but at a more removed distance. As we sat there, maybe fifty feet away, I saw two pop up right next to Sachi, so close she could see their bodies underwater. At most they were two arm’s-length away and I now have to wonder if we’ll ever get closer to a wild dolphin. Short of them coming right up to us, this may have been the encounter of a lifetime! With that fear in mind, I’ve been trying to visually lock in that memory as much as possible. I worry that it’ll fade away if I don’t stop recalling it.
I am, once again, contemplating a name change. I was so sure I would become “Jace,” now that I have the chance to change my name forever via marriage license. However, after much debate and workshopping, I’m back where I started. My inclination was to change my last name to “Young” because it more closely aligns with how “Yang” is pronounced in Chinese, but everyone hated it. And then everyone hated “Jace” even more, which is sad because it’s the name I’d been sitting on for well over a decade—it’ll remain my pen name, since I have the URL already. (Ameer, George, and Sachi’s reactions could not be stronger against “Jace.”) So anyways, I am workshopping some more names, in the effort to escape the prison that is “Jon.” Basically, my real first name is my Chinese first name anyway, so there will have to be some name swapping regardless, but I sure want to change my entire name!
Along with French, we’ve been taking dance classes at the adult school as well. The first three weeks was country two-step and now we’re into East Coast swing. As expected, I am a horrible lead dancer—I just want to be the follower—but I’m trying hard to walk with purpose, not be weird, and to be a good partner.
Things to watch: Lilith Fair documentary, this documentary on YouTube about birding called Listers, and don’t watch One Battle After Another. Well, okay, watch it if you must, so we can talk about it, but let me just say that we’ve starting constructing rules for which movies to avoid and the first rule is gonna be “if it’s over two and a half hours, pass!”
I guess that’s if for September? Oh yeah, I threw together a Poway Olympics for the purposes of entertaining mostly myself. But it was more Challenge-themed than Olympics. And I made everyone participate. It had some physical challenges, a few puzzles, and lots of breaks because people can only listen to me in ten minute increments. I hope this becomes an annual competition because I’ve got big plans for the next one!
