Let life also be an Etch A Sketch, says Charles Assisi

“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, ‘Old age is a continuous series of losses.’ Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman : ‘Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.’”

Now, in middle age (how strange that sounds for us, the once-so-young, to say), I can admit that highlighting that passage as a “particularly well-written one” was the act of a more naïve and far younger man. The true import of Gawande’s message has begun to sink in now. Because what I am witness to is a series of losses all around, losses that are both literal and metaphorical.

To begin with, the people I grew up worshipping and thinking of as the ones to emulate are now dead, or are staring down mortality as they retell stories from a bygone era. It is a unique kind of orphaning, when all one’s heroes have lost their powers.

It is inevitable that this would lead to some soul-searching. I have begun, sometimes, to wonder: could I have lived differently, used my time to greater effect? Close friends are reporting similar trains of thought. But life marches on. There is work to be done, a precious family to love, money to be earned, and much constant effort, just to maintain the status quo.

But do things have to stay as they were, or are? This is a question few people seem to consider, as their years pass them by. It’s a question that certainly hadn’t occurred to me.

The idea of introducing disruption into one’s own life surfaced in a conversation with a friend a few days ago. He recently upended his life, and not for any of the usual reasons. At the time of the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, he was on the fast track at one of India’s biggest companies. He seemed destined for great things. And then he walked away from it all. I had assumed he wanted to exit the rat race; perhaps use his middle-age years to launch himself in a new direction, maybe as an entrepreneur.

His reasons and his mission were entirely different. His mother is now frail, and lives just outside Chennai; his daughter is a teen who loves living in Mumbai. “Both are now vulnerable creatures who need me. It’s only a matter of time before my mother is gone and my daughter won’t need me in the same way,” he told me.

When he did the math on his working hours, he realised that he could not do justice to a demanding job and spend these precious years as he wished to with his family. So he now offers his services as a consultant, and has carved himself a whole new lifestyle.

He spends at least 10 days every two months working out of Chennai. He is travelling more, seeing the country and the world, thus fulfilling a dream of his own. And the rest of his time he spends in Mumbai, with his daughter.

What does his wife make of it all, I asked him. “She understands that I don’t want to have regrets about the past in the future,” he said.

While this is not how most of us have lived, as the world expands and so much more seems possible, there is certainly a message here that I would like to pass on to my children. Life is not just a carefully woven tapestry; it can also be an Etch A Sketch. Don’t rule out the option of shaking it all up and starting over.

(The writer is co-founder at Founding Fuel & co-author of The Aadhaar Effect)