Horsehair Pyjamas
(The Beauty of being Unsuccessful at 50)
Many men I know who are around my age look a bit lost. They’ve spent the best part of three decades building a career and raising a family and now the career has been built and the family raised. The kids have left home, or are at Uni, or gallivanting around the globe. It can get quiet at home when the kids have gone; fewer fights, less music, less laughter. The home (and mortgage), the career, the marriage are all sort of ticking along. The fires of youth are now gently glowing embers.
I have one friend who I meet from time to time, and he always asks me what I do with myself these days because he has nothing to do. He has the expression of a man looking into a great void. He tells me that he asks all his friends the same question and apparently no-one has supplied him with a satisfactory answer. They don’t have anything to do either, he tells me. He comes across as a bit lost and bemused by this stage in his life. He speaks about this issue in such a way as to suggest we are all in the same boat. And for some reason I don’t want to tell him otherwise. Maybe I don’t want him to feel bad or otherwise I don’t want to lose the rapport that comes from experiencing a similar plight. So, I tell him I don’t have much going on either. I hint at little things I do here and there. I tell him that I go to the gym from time to time, very much downplaying it. I mention that I go out walking, but he doesn’t seem to see that as a thing. He seems to see that as something I do in an effort to fill the void rather than something I like doing, and I sort of play along with that.
And anyway I have a weird personality trait whereby I don’t really talk about the stuff I do. And if I do talk about the stuff I do it’s said so much in passing that the listener never really takes hold of it. If I ran a marathon (note, I never have), I would probably say I went out for a bit of a run. Look even my example is not something I have actually done. It might be because most of the stuff I do is of the dull introverted type. So, I don’t mention the novel I’m writing or my daily meditation and journalling practices. It would seem to me a little odd to mention them.
For me these feel like prime years for personal development. The kids no longer rely on me to the extent they once did. I now work from home which has freed up all that commuting time that I can now invest in myself. I find it intriguing that my friend appears so lost. Because it seems to me that now that so many of life’s needs have been met, we have such a wonderful opportunity to meet our wants.
But I think I’m at something of an advantage because he appears significantly more successful than me. He has a bigger house and a better car. He definitely comes across as more confident. I still have the drive of the failure. I don’t want to live my entire life lacking in money and confidence. So whilst others my age are putting their feet up, I’m still in there fighting.
I feel like I’m just getting started. The fires of ambition are burning more brightly than they ever have. I haven’t achieved my goals yet, and that leaves me with a lovely little frisson of need and want. I still have a mortgage to pay, and dependants to take care of, and a pension to fill. I still have ambition. The ambition to get fit, to write a novel, to blog, to develop a life where I can live part of the year in a warmer climate, to retire my wife (or at least semi-retire my wife), to help my mum financially, to fix up my house, to continue to learn foreign languages, and to continue to develop my spiritual self. I’m not going gently, not yet. I can’t go gently.
Knowing that I could still exit this world as a failure is very motivating to me.
There’s the famous Marvin Hagler quote about motivation: “It's tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5am when you've been sleeping in silk pyjamas.” Well for me it’s easy to get up at 5am for a run when I’ve been wearing horsehair pyjamas.