A Tweet turned into an Essay

Here it is...

Your 20s are for exploration.

Your 30s are for the chase.

your 40s for the grind

your 50s are for getting shit done. (I think anyway, I’ll let you know in ten years.)

As for the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s… I look forward to figuring that out.

I wrote that tweet last week without thinking much about it, but it sort of stuck in my head. I write a lot of nonsense and put words down without always thinking them through, but this tweet seemed to have some operable truth at least in regards to my own life’s path.

In my twenties after finishing school with a basic liberal arts education with an emphasis in geography, I didn’t know a single thing besides write that I wanted to do. But I could think of about 50 things I wanted to try. I also knew a few things I absolutely didn’t want to do. I hated customer service jobs. My mind was not suited to dealing with people in regards to service. Some people are wired for it. Some simply are not. I knew this  about myself.

So when I heard about a job opening building cabins down the Bitterroot Valley, I took it. If nothing else it would provide some life long skills on how to build things and use a chainsaw among other tools. I’d used a chainsaw landscaping and working around my parents property but never felt totally comfortable with it. It was a skill I wanted to possess. Here was my chance.

This job was a valuable experience, both in terms of learning new skills and dealing with people from very different backgrounds than my own. I’ve never had a problem with interacting with people from different background and in fact I’ve always quite enjoyed it. I was and still am a writer, and the best way to get to know culture is to meet people that bring different perspectives on our shared society.

But this job didn’t last terribly long. A fall from an icy 16 foot wall nearly broke my spine, and I quit after a few weeks of limping and attempting to recover. I knew at a young age that my body could only sustain so many injuries without creating a lifelong limp, and this one felt like enough. I moved on. At least I’d had time to get comfortable with a chainsaw.

Over the decade that was my twenties I settled in to almost exclusively outside work, never finding one that I wanted to make a career of, though I nearly did on a few. I planted trees. I built trails. I fought forest fires. I worked in a lookout. I landscaped. I did home and property maintenance. I thought several times that I could make a career with the forest service and was offered a few positions that could have suited me nicely. But I’d met a woman that loved to travel and the way she liked to travel included leaving the country for extended periods of time and with some relative frequency. And while I did not always go with her, I liked the flexibility to have time off with her when she was back in the country. So I never settled into anything specifically. Too much to see. Too much to try.

I knew one thing about myself. I wanted to write. And I wrote a lot.

But no matter what I finished, I never could figure out a way to monetize anything. It was incredibly frustrating. I wrote several complete screenplays and kids books, but no matter how many copies I sent out, the rejection letters always looked the same, if they arrived at all.

This was my twenties. Exploring the country by car. The mountains by foot. Exploring the world when possible. And writing. Working when I needed to. And while the money certainly stressed me from time to time, like when the head gaskets blew on a car I’d bought four days before with all of what little savings I had, I always figured it out, and the challenge of living a dirt bag lifestyle built a resilience and thick skin that has served me well. It also allowed me to see things I’d never again have the time or ability to see. You have energy and youth on your side in your twenties and it would be a shame to stifle it in a sedentary lifestyle.

By 30 I had a few new ideas. I’d never lost my interest in geography so I went back to school to get a masters degree studying with possibly the most intelligent and intellectually capable human I’ve ever met. Jeff Gritzner is a story for another day. I had in mind that I might like to join the CIA or State Dept. or get a job in consulting on energy security. For some still unknown reason I’ve always had a fascination with energy development and trade especially as it relates to the cross roads of the world, Central Asia. So I spent two years studying it intensely. By now I’d come to realize that as I grew older I’d like to make more money. While I’d quite enjoyed the freedoms I’d exploited in my 20’s, and while many of my peers still bemoaned the idea of children, I liked the idea of having kids and had come to a realization that in order to show them the world I wanted to show them, I’d need to make a little more money than my hodgepodged work life provided. There was time to plan, execute, and get ready for having kids I assumed.

But something happened a little, though not totally unexpectedly. Ella became pregnant. Our baby was due right at the time I was to finished graduate school.

And our thinking quickly changed. No time to plan. No time to execute. We were in this.

While working in Azerbaijan had an appeal and I was certainly qualified to work with the State Department (I’d been turned down to the CIA though) the idea of raising a kid in Central Asia did not have as much appeal to raising a child in Montana. I’d only begun exploring these mountains. I wanted more of them.

I had no regrets in getting my degree, but we chose to pivot and quickly. That summer after Gretel was born I still had a seasonal job in a fire tower, but I quickly realized I could not stand being away that much and that was to be my last season, at least for the time being.

I took a job in a grocery store out of necessity, and quickly found my way into a job working for a wine distributor. This job, as I’ve written about before, felt like a soul crusher when I first took it. But I needed the money. So, as had been instilled in me as a kid, in the words of my dad, work hard and you will figure it out. So I did. I dove into an arena I knew nothing about. I quickly learned that I had not only a good ability to taste things and define the differences with my vocabulary, but also the ability to talk to strangers easily. My curiosity in humans, a trait I gained over years of writing and exploring, worked to my advantage in this micro setting of wine sales. I am genuinely curious about people, and that is one of the most valuable traits in sales. I quickly got good at the job. I quickly realized it was in fact not soul crushing in the least, but was a valuable learning experience. And I found pleasure at being good at something unexpectedly.

But it was still not the job I wanted. I was in my early thirties. I was honing in on what I wanted, but still not quite there. I still wanted to write. I wanted to make enough money to have a middle class lifestyle. I wanted some free time. And while I loved working for the people I worked for, I now realized, I wanted to work for myself. I’ve always been independent in that regard.

Coffee. I had the idea driving across town to play cards with friends one night. I bought my coffee online from shops outside Montana.

When I told Ella my idea late the same night, she liked it immediately. And as I presented her with a new idea every other day or so, many of them down right bad, it was a win. We decided to pursue it.

The story of how Black Coffee came about is for a different day, but by the time I was 37 we had launched our business. We had a 5 year old and a one year old at the time we launched (we’d written the business plan and done the build out while having our second baby.) This was an incredibly hectic, frantic, scrambled, distraught, distressing, and overwhelming time period. Intense barely describes it. We worked hours I’m not sure I could do any more. We juggled money like it was fire. We felt the burn. It was stressful. But it was exciting. It was challenging to the core. We did not have free time. That did not exist. I wrote almost nothing for a couple years other than notes for stories I would work on as soon as I could swim to the surface and breathe. We made new friends. We faded from others. But we did it. This was the chase.

The next decade would be geared towards making the business work. For the most part it did. Sometimes it didn’t. That is the nature of owning a business. Growth spurts. Leveling out. Growing again. But for the most part we knew it was working and slowly, very slowly got above water and were able to breathe. Ella was eventually able to quit her night job and come full time at the business. Slowly I found time to write. Wrote a few screenplays. Wrote my first novel. (Well, second, but the first will never see light of day. It is legitimate chaos and probably does not deserve to be called an actual story, though it is very long.) We found time to travel with our kids, taking them on trips to coffee origin. This had been the plan. We’d executed it. It was working. Not without challenges, but no challenges like the early years. The challenges took on more complexity especially in the arena of juggling parenting of growing children and managing a business but it worked. This is the grind. Kids grow fast. Exponentially faster as they grow. It’s wild. It makes no sense. How does time shift so drastically? Life balance. There is no busy like parent busy. I’m not speaking derogatory to those without kids, but with kids there is an added layer of complexity to life that simply does not exist without them. They are 24/7/365 x 18 years. Simple math.

Before I knew it I’d hit 50. I wrote an essay on that you can find in the archives here. A few things happened for me. The grind has become more manageable. In part this is because of the way I’ve chosen to approach it. The work hasn’t subsided, but the grind has. I’m more focused on what I want to accomplish and how and have had enough failures to see the path a little more clearly. I know better what works and what doesn’t. Not always, but more often. I also know and am confident in what I care about and what I don’t care about. My goals have shifted too. I have a clearer view of the evolution life has in store for humans, and know there are things I need to do now before it it is too late. We don’t get to keep our young bodies forever. And it is with this in mind that I have no regrets about the things I did in my twenties before obligations took hold. It also makes me realize how valuable my time is and has added a keen sense of value to the time I have. I’m not going to waste it on things or people I don’t want to. I’m going to double down on the things I do want. I’ve also gained confidence in my own way of seeing the world. I’ve always known I see it differently than most, and always known I want to create my own path through it. But at 50 I’m happy to call bullshit when I see it and walk away from conversations that aren’t going anywhere. I see arguing as more an exercise in vanity than I’d ever seemed to notice before. I don’t have time to argue with people. I don’t have time to waste. I have things I want to do, to accomplish, to see, to explore and to figure out. I have more questions than ever. My curiosities have only grown, so I want to dive in further. This is what I want to do with my 50s. I want to learn, see, and document, not for others, but for myself, and to share the experience with my close friends and family.

As for the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, hell I’m shooting for 100s. We’ll see. If I’m lucky I’ll get there. If not I’ll die trying. I don’t know what these future decades have in store. I know eventually my body will feel like slowing down, but I’m not there yet, and as I push it more, it likes it, and doesn’t want to slow down yet. I know it’s critical at this age to push my body more than before. It’s easy to glide physically through youth. We have to work for it as we age though. Same goes for the mind. It’s a muscle. It needs to be pushed… use it or lose it.

We shift our perspectives as we age. But that is part of the evolution. Our relationships change. Our minds grow. Our thoughts develop. Our needs change. Different phases of life require different things. The age of having young kids was unlike anything I could have ever imagined. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, but I also couldn’t imagine trying to replicate it again now. But that is life. We can’t go back. We can do what we can do right now. We can plan for the future but it will always look different than we think. Expect the unexpected. In a good way. Our imagination is rarely as good as reality. Life always has different things in mind. That is the way the world works.