Do you ever tire of being yourself?

Nothing’s “the matter”. You’re lucky to be alive, capable, comfortable, when so many aren’t. You’ve got plenty to keep you busy. You count your lucky stars – you can reiterate all the bromides: so many your age are dead, disabled, in despair. You should be grateful – and are – fervently – but, oh, today is too predictable, safe, familiar– been there, done that; same old – yes, the undiscovered streams in all directions, inviting, enticing, but, oh, your curiosity is weary, what’s the good of knowing?

You’re bored with yourself. Clinicians slap labels on conditions – “depression” – but that’s not it at all. You’re glad, grateful, not depressed – no complaints! – only it’s hard winching your grouchy body out of bed. Let me just rest here and wait for dawn.

I salute you this morning from such a bog. I wouldn’t mention it, it’s ignoble, it will pass – only my pledge – to myself and you – is to speak my mind, not duck topics from remorse or chagrin. If this interminable series has value – for ten years now, daily, almost four million words! – it’s the consistency of its candor. This has been a true account, true as I could make it, every day, and sometimes, oh, I limp, grumble. What to do? Storytellers can ascribe disgraceful feelings to their discreditable characters – Shakespeare was Iago too – but I’ve no gift for invention. I say what I see and what I see is me. “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well,” says my brother Thoreau.

Perhaps the most potent lesson of my later years has been self-reliance or, you might say, home repairs. Take charge, fix what you can, depend on the fewest possible. “Sadness is not your fate,” I tell myself, “but your fault.” Play the hand you’ve been dealt – with a smile – victimization has few charms – the glass is half full, not half empty – misfortune is a jail of your own construction. Whining afflicts me like shrieking chalk – my own worst of all. (MAGgots’ self-pity disgusts me, as I may have mentioned.)

My solution is to get up, get busy, put myself at risk. “Old men ought to be explorers,” wrote T.S. Eliot,

What I’ve lost in time is infinite, but also the glory of this instant, so snap out of it, sniveller, do something hard. The snapping out may not be a snap, but so? Try harder. Sometimes extracting myself from my gloom requires “the jaws of life,” a machine to claw folks from car wrecks – so be it. Never surrender and, sooner or later, whoa!, I feel better.

The risk for me is no longer physical. I understand George (Daddy) Bush parachuting on his eighty-fifth birthday, but what I’m doing now is both safer and less scary for loved ones. (Jane, I need to believe, would not want me jumping out of planes.) My mind is what’s grumping so that’s what I defenestrate, hurling it into uncertainty, daring it to fly. Each word I eke aims for “another intensity… further union, a deeper communion” – and is doomed to fail – but no matter, my jeopardy will have diverted me, racing my pulse.

Joy takes more work as we age – our body aches, we have lost so many and so much – that’s what makes it heroic. “Nothing is more beautiful than cheerfulness in an old face,” wrote German Romantic, Jean Paul, a friend of Goethe.