Is Life Having Us?
Time is a strange little thief.
When we are young, time feels like a locked door.
We wait to be sixteen so we can drive. We wait to be eighteen so we can be adults, or at least be legally mistaken for adults. We wait to be twenty-one so we can drink, vote with slightly more confidence, and pretend we know what we are doing in public.
We wait to graduate. We wait to move out. We wait to fall in love. We wait to get the job. We wait to start the life.
That is the trick.
We spend the early part of life waiting for life to begin. Then, somewhere along the way, it begins without asking us.
By our thirties and forties, the waiting changes shape. It becomes career, rent, mortgage, kids, bills, insurance, repairs, overtime, groceries, appointments, taxes, car trouble, medical trouble, school trouble, work trouble, and whatever new flaming dumpster fire fate decides to throw into the garage this week.
We tell ourselves we are building.
Building a family. Building a career. Building stability. Building a portfolio. Building a future.
And maybe we are.
There is nothing wrong with building. A life without structure collapses into noise. Somebody has to pay the light bill. Somebody has to remember the dentist appointment. Somebody has to keep the house from turning into a documentary about losing civilization.
The question is not whether responsibility matters.
Of course it matters.
The question is whether responsibility has taken control.
By the time we hit fifty, the question changes. It is no longer, “What am I waiting for?”
It becomes, “What did I miss while I was waiting?”
That one matters.
Because fifty is not old in the way twenty-year-olds think it is old. Fifty is not ancient. Fifty is not done. Fifty is not the end credits. But fifty is old enough to know that “someday” is a suspicious little word.
Someday we will travel.
Someday we will write.
Someday we will start the project.
Someday we will spend more time with the people we love.
Someday we will take better care of ourselves.
Someday we will stop living like the whole point is to survive until next Thursday.
Paydays are Thursday.
The problem with someday is that it has no address. You cannot put it on the calendar. You cannot drive there. You cannot retire into it.
Someday is where unused lives go to be stored.
And the older I get, the less patience I have for that particular storage unit.
Because life does not usually arrive in one dramatic moment. It does not kick open the door looking like a superhero, hand you the keys to your real life on a platter, and announce, “Congratulations. Your real life starts now.”
Life is usually smaller than that.
It is coffee before the house wakes up.
It is laughing with someone who knows exactly how weird you are and has chosen not to flee. That was my greatest find. I found the woman who knows exactly how weird I am, and she has been here for nearly thirty years.
It is the project you keep coming back to even when nobody is clapping yet.
It is the road trip, the garden, the notebook, the song, the dumb joke, the dinner, the sunrise you almost missed because you were too busy being useful.
Usefulness can become a cage.
Responsibility can become a costume.
Survival can become an identity.
You can do everything right and still discover that you have been managing a life more than living one.
That is the part we do not like to say out loud, because it sounds ungrateful.
It sounds selfish.
It sounds like complaining.
But it is not complaining to ask whether the machine you are feeding is actually taking you anywhere.
It is not selfish to notice that your life is not an unlimited resource.
It is not weakness to look around and ask, “Is this mine? Or did I just inherit somebody else’s schedule and call it a life?”
The brutal truth is that nobody hands us a refund for unused years.
Nobody shows up at fifty-five and says, “Good news. You were very practical, so here are seven summers back.”
The time goes where it goes.
Some of it goes to love. Some of it goes to labor. Some of it goes to duty. Some of it goes to fear. Some of it goes to waiting. Some of it goes to people who deserved it. Some of it goes to people who absolutely did not.
And then, one day, we look up.
Looking up matters.
Because the point is not to abandon responsibility and disappear into the forest carrying only your unpaid bills.
The point is to stop confusing motion with meaning.
The point is to stop treating life like it begins after the next milestone.
After the debt is gone.
After the kids are grown.
After the promotion.
After the house is fixed.
After the crisis passes.
After everything is finally calm.
Everything is never finally calm.
There will always be another problem standing in the driveway, staring at you, waiting to be noticed.
So maybe the question is simpler than we make it.
What part of life can I stop postponing?
Just one piece.
Take the walk. Write the page. Have the conversation. Take the trip. Start reclaiming, a little bit at a time, the years you have been surrendering to the machine.
One small refusal to let life become nothing but maintenance.
Because time is fleeting, yes.
But that is not the warning.
That is the invitation.
The warning is this:
If we are not careful, we will spend youth waiting for life to start, middle age keeping life running, and old age wondering when we were supposed to live.
So I keep coming back to the question.
Are we having a life?
Or is life having us?
I think about this because I once tried to explain it to a room full of kids who had every reason not to listen to me.
Years ago, I taught for one year at a school for troubled youth.
At the beginning of the year, the new teachers had to give an introductory speech. I had nothing scripted. No polished little speech folded in my pocket. No inspirational teacher movie moment prepared.
I just started talking.
I do not remember every word I said. I only remember that I found the groove. The room was there, the moment was there, and somehow I stepped into it.
I started where they were.
“Yeah, school is lame.”
“This is not fun.”
“There is no point to this.”
I gave them the whole familiar script. The one students say to each other. The one that says school is stupid, adults do not get it, none of this matters, and being too cool for the whole thing is somehow the smarter position.
And then I turned it.
I told them they were still young.
Their lives were not set in stone yet.
They still had choices.
Then I asked them to look twenty years down the road.
“Seems like a long time, doesn’t it?”
“Twenty years is longer than most of you have already been alive.”
“Where do you see yourself?”
“What are you going to be doing?”
“What do you want to be doing?”
That was not a soft question in that room.
This was not a school full of kids casually bored by algebra. Many of those kids had already seen more chaos than some adults ever will. Some of them were already standing near the edge of systems that do not gently hand people back their futures.
So when I asked them where they saw themselves in twenty years, I was not asking for a cute classroom exercise.
I was asking them to notice that their lives were bigger than the next bad decision.
Bigger than the next argument.
Bigger than the next suspension.
Bigger than the identity someone else had already started writing onto them.
But then I turned it again.
I told them it almost did not matter what they wanted to be doing.
Not because dreams do not matter. Dreams do matter. But dreams still have to pass through doors.
I told them that even if all they wanted to do was work at Tropicana hauling oranges from the local plant, they still needed a high school diploma.
Not because a truck driver needs every piece of information that gets taught in school.
They do not.
Not because every worksheet is sacred.
It is not.
Not because the system is perfect.
It absolutely is not.
But because someday, some future employer is going to look at them and ask one basic question:
At sixteen, that sounds insulting. At forty, it sounds like a key.
That was what I was trying to tell those kids.
And, honestly, it is what I am still trying to tell myself. Life is longer than the crisis in front of you. But it is shorter than the fantasy version where you get unlimited chances to begin.
Maybe the sharper question is:
What are we doing now that our future self will know we actually finished?
Can this person finish something they started? That was the point. That was the whole thing. School was not only about proving they knew the material. It was about proving they could complete the task. It was about proving they could stay with something long enough to get to the other side of it.
Because time does not only ask what we want. Time asks what we are willing to finish. It asks what we are willing to build before the door closes. It asks whether we are going to spend our lives waiting for the right moment, or whether we are going to take the imperfect moment we actually have and do something with it.
Are we having a life?
Or is life having us?