Lost Decade

Before the beginning of this year I could never start a sentence, or story, the way this one does

I was talking on the phone to my financial advisor the other day, about possibly buying a condo or a house at some point. He was walking me through the pros and cons and eventually asked me, “Have you ever heard of the ‘lost decade’?”

I answered, “No. But I had one myself.” Then I said something dumb and vague about being in your twenties and, you know, bumming around. “Like ya do” I added in a stab at personal connection.

There was a pause and he said with clear confusion in his voice, “What are you talking about?”

“Cocaine,” I answered. “What are you talking about?”

“Real estate,” he said.

My advisor is a tough house. Which actually gives me a shit ton of confidence in his ability to manage my money. There’s a reason why politicians and money people don’t have great senses of humor. I would argue that it’s because the ‘big funny’ resides in being an outlier, admitting failings, and jabbing at the status quo. Not qualities that get you an ‘Employee of the Month’ plaque. And yes, there are plenty of exceptions. But I’m guessing those are the ones that make you a little uneasy, right? You don’t want your advisor making jokes about the your portfolio.  

After I got off the phone, I texted my joke to a handful of friends. And I have to say, I got a solid response from them – so that righted my universe a bit. But then I started thinking about losing a decade, losing time, was it really ten years, and what was I actually doing in my twenties?

I am not a regretful person, thank God, or I would never get out of bed. I loved much of my twenties and some of that time was tortured too. In my case, the suffering I experienced in those years was kind of sexy. I smoked a lot and walked down NYC streets, in my ripped-neck sweatshirt (ala Jennifer Beals) wondering why the world wasn’t “getting me”. Honestly, I probably thought that intense suffering would make me a better artist.

Middle-aged suffering isn’t sexy. It’s boring as hell. And I am so not interested in losing a unnecessary time to it. I simply don’t have a decade to lose on figuring shit out, staring into mirrors, and endlessly reviewing grievances.

This isn’t to say that I am rejecting suffering. It’s impossible. The perfect storm of loss I’ve gone through in the past four years, requires attention and care and forgiveness. And frankly, I had little choice but to walk toward my sadness, trusting Buddhist teachings – and I have only recently emerged. Entirely changed, by the way.

And I wouldn’t call these four years “lost” as I jokingly referred to my twenties. Rather, I learned how to suffer efficiently. If that can even be a phrase.

I learned that suffering cannot be extinguished by pharmaceuticals or recreational drugs or even talking a lot to friends. All those things can mitigate it, and that can be life-savingly useful sometimes. Especially the talking to friends, part. To clarify, I’m not really talking about chronic depression or anxiety here. I’m talking about your garden variety grief, disappointment, loss, and common existential fears. The stuff that wallops you en mass especially when you get older. And what I found was that if I let suffering simply wash through me (I’m sure I’m plagiarizing one of the many books I read on grief here), it tended to have less of a hold than the suffering that I had tamped down in the past.

I learned that letting this suffering move through me, has softened me greatly. From that place, it’s really hard to dredge up old grievances. And even when they pop into my head, most of them seem laughably small -- not worth my attention.

And there’s something else. Hard to put into words. Allowing the suffering to do its thing, changes time. And lack of time is part of the existential fear, right? That we don’t have enough of it. That we need to get on top of that Bucket List. That we won’t achieve some marker (in my case, a great novel – whatever that means). And that we’ll die before we are ever truly content with what we have. Allowing suffering in, slows time down and you actually seem to have more of it. Sometimes maddeningly so.

And then, here’s the even freakier part – when I emerge from a period of grieving, I find joy in the smallest things. Food, the light coming through my living room windows, God forgive me – the fizz of a Diet Coke. It’s this (and now I am SURE I am lifting or combining this from somewhere), it’s like sitting in a dark cabin with yourself and looking into a roaring fire with a cup of hot chocolate and missing someone (OK, they’re dead. They usually are at this point. We’re past the romantic break-ups stage) and being slightly comforted by memories and allowing yourself to cry. And then, after a while you get a bit bored and your hip joints need a stretch and you go to the door and open it and WOW, WOW, WOW – what a goddamned gorgeous world is out there! You make up the rest, dear reader – it’s either snowing or you’re on a tropical beach, or somewhere else sublime. And it’s so vivid. The joy so pure it’s shocking. Hot damn. That is what sitting with suffering has given me. A high that I wouldn’t have believed possible, or have been particularly interested in, during my lost decade.

Photo credit: Tom Lasher