Living In The In-Between

Waiting

Living In The In-Between

Have you ever noticed how we live our lives on some weird journey in between this and that?

Maybe it's just me, but I always have a sense that no single experience in my life completes the puzzle of living. I am always thrown into an anticipation of something else.

Take birthdays, for example. I just had a birthday last month, and that was a fairly nice celebratory day, and now I'm already thinking about my next birthday and what it will be like to be 64. You see, I sort of dread the idea of being 64 because of that Beatles's song, "When I'm Sixty-Four," you know the one that goes "Will you still need me/Will you still feed me/When I'm sixty-four?" Most of my life, I've kind of thought of that song as an anthem for some kind of borderline between independent living and being dependent on other people to do stuff for me.

I'm not sure what kind of stuff I'll need done for me when I hit the age of 64, but I'm pretty sure I'll still be able to feed myself, shower alone, dress myself, and do all the other essentials of my life. However, there will come a time, I guess, when I won't be able to do some of those things. When I think of the possibility of depending on someone else to get me through the day, I have to confess I get a little anxious. I'm not sure I could stand being nursed or fussed over by someone else. It seems a little creepy when I think that there might be day when someone else has to tug on my underwear and tuck my penis to the left or the right depending on its preference for that day.

And who will those other people be? Will my loved ones clean up my accidents and messes around the house? Will I have to live in one of those old folks homes, where some Nurse Ratched will tend to me like I was an elder-child? Quite honestly, I fear losing all my dignity somewhere down the road of time. It all sounds like a huge drag.

So I live somewhere in the in-between of being just old and being uselessly old, in between being OK with the way I live and not being OK with the way I may have to live.

Most of us have similar preoccupations with what lies ahead, with the next turn in the road, with the next chapter in the book of life. It's like we're in some cosmic waiting room — waiting for whatever is inevitably coming next.

Parents know all about living in the in-between. If you've ever had a two-year-old, you know about the "terrible twos." For some unknown reason, two-year-olds suddenly go berserk, and mothers and fathers everywhere can't wait for this little nuance of a nuisance to reach a end. Almost miraculously, at three-years-old, a child reverts to being the angel he or she once was. Then at the age of twelve or thirteen, puberty kicks in, and once again, all hell breaks loose.

The teenage years are a classic example of living in the in-between, for everyone involved. Thankfully, most kids leave home and go to college around the age of eighteen. There, they can be as nutty as a stale Christmas fruitcake, just as long as they don't come back before they're twenty-one. By the age of twenty-one, they'll have learned how to drink themselves into a state of oblivion, have experimented with some kind of non-medicinal hallucinogenic drug, and have lost their virginity.

After their college years, most young people are ready to settle into adulthood and thereby begin the longest stretch of the in-between highway. Year after year clicks off the odometer of their adult lives as they pass through the towns of thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty. Each stop on this road map of life always seems to be approached with dire apprehension, followed by conciliatory acceptance, and then more apprehension. It's a wonder anyone makes it to 64.

Most will get a job, and quickly learn what it means to live from pay cheque to pay cheque. For most of us, money flows out of bank accounts much faster than it flows in, so we struggle in the in-between world of paydays, as we try to balance bills, taxes, money for food, money for love, and so on.

Then, of course, many will get married. Marriage is possibly the most joyful and yet most direful form of living in the in-between. We marry with wonderful and hopeful expectations, with the notion that we have found a soulmate with whom we shall live forever, until one day, we wake up and hear a loud tick-tick-ticking of discontent. Suddenly, she looks like shit in the morning, and he looks like crap in the evening. She gets up and throws on the rattiest looking bathrobe and walks around with her hair looking like she had just climbed over an electric fence, and he sits around watching sports on the television in sweatpants and some tattered Bob Seeger T-shirt while drinking beer and farting. Romance wanes, sex disappears, and before long, eyes wander and wonder. Tick-tick-tick. The countdown to divorce has begun, and for those who will admit it, the hell of living in the in-between begins, as the married couple moves through the seemingly unending days of agony between giving up and getting out.

We're taught to "follow our dreams, and someday we'll find happiness." Someday? Someday? When does "someday" come? Far too many of us spend most of our lives waiting for that wondrous someday to arrive, while we twist and turn in the in-between.

Expectant mothers know the rolling aches and pains of the in-between.

Soldiers on a tour of duty know the dangers of the in-between.

Online lovers video-chat in the in-between.

Prisoners in the "big house" live a sentence in the in-between.

Addicts, hooked on drugs, alcohol, food, or even sex, try to escape the in-between.

People with terminal illnesses struggle through the diminishing days, months, or years of the in-between.

Wait, wait, wait. Life is such a perpetual chronology of waiting.

I know, I know. You'll say, "Live in the moment. Live for today. Tomorrow will take care of itself."

And you're right, of course. Being overly concerned with what the future might bring is nothing more than an irrational obsession. After all, so many learned philosophers say that it's the journey that matters, over and above the destination. And yet, there is no journey without a destination. It's a paradox, I guess, one of life's many riddles that keeps us forging ahead and grasping at what is next.

What is next? No one can say for certain, but whatever is coming will come and possibly answer all your questions. Then you'll wake up the next day with a new set of questions and expectations as you go back to living in the in-between.