Today is my 52nd birthday.
52 was the number on my football jersey in high school. It seemed like such a big number back then. And I suppose it is to a teenager with a face full of acne and a future that looks like a blank canvas.
I’m long past the days for feeling a need for celebration. Birthdays, I find these days are more somber and filled with reflection. Considering not so much what days are ahead, but how many have gone. And so I sit here on the back of this boat drifting within an endless ocean in quiet contemplation.
It’s easy to believe that my best days are gone. The stiffer joints. The every greying beard. The creases around my eyes from squinting into too much sun. But I still get up. My back and my hands are still strong. My mind is still sharp. There is much life left within me.
Hemingway was 52 when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. It was published in 1952. It was a pivotal book, not just because it won him the Nobel Prize for literature. It was because going into it many believed that his career was done. His best work over. He was yesterday’s news. A has been.
They believed him to be irrelevant.
It turned out to be the culmination of everything he had spent his lifetime trying to become. It was the capstone on a storied career and a storied life.
There was nothing left to prove.
There still isn’t.
So evening as the sun was setting, I grabbed a fishing pole and cast my own line into the sea. I caught nothing but a sunset. And that’s perfectly okay with me.
“The old man opened his eyes and for a moment he was coming back from a long way away. Then he smiled.”
― The Old Man and the Sea
