This is not the book you should have read at thirty

Somebody's car door goes, two gardens down.

And the thought arrives on its own, the way it does. If somebody had put this in front of me then.

That is not a foolish thought and nothing here is going to talk you out of it.

Forty years is forty years. If you had set this down at thirty-one you would have had four decades on the other side of it, and some of what went wrong in them might have gone differently. There is no honest way to say that does not matter. It matters, and it belongs on the list of real losses with the rest of them.

So, not it is never too late. Sometimes it is. It was too late for the thing you would most like to have done, and it was too late a long while before tonight, and this chapter is not going to pretend otherwise.

What is not too late is narrower than that, and it is the only thing being claimed here.

And it holds the whole way down. It is the same claim at nine months and at nine hours, and for somebody who is not getting out of that bed again it is not a smaller one. That is not a figure of speech and it is not the polite paragraph.

Whatever it comes to needs nobody in the room, either. One sentence, said out loud, accurately, in an empty house. That is the whole of it, and it is the only version of it that has never once depended on somebody coming.

It is heavier than it was.

Forty years of carrying it put things on it that were not on it at thirty-one. People died while it was still on. Whoever stopped ringing stopped ringing. The ones you could once have gone and spoken to are not available to be spoken to. None of that comes off here, and nothing in this book is going to weigh it for you.

What the forty years did not do is put anything in front of the act.

There is no part of it that has to be carried first before the rest can go down. There is no backlog to clear. It goes down in one movement, and the movement does not get longer because the thing got heavier.

You can be behind on the life. There is nothing in the act to be behind on.

And you did not have forty years at thirty-one either. Not in any form you could use.

Nobody has ever held more than the next thing they were about to do. That is the whole of what anybody is ever holding — not a decade, not a plan, not the rest of the pages. You had one next thing in front of you then. You have one now. They are the same size.

And if you have already done this — if it reached you at thirty, or at fifty, and you set the thing down and then one morning it was back on you — you know the part most people have to be told.

Putting it down does not mean it never comes back. It means its return does not oblige you to put yourself on trial again.

Late is true of the life. It was never true of the act.