I’m guessing most of you, if you’re
old enough, remember a day that you realized that your life was different than
you planned.
And I don’t just mean at the end of
the week, when you realize you haven’t made it to the grocery store again. I
mean the big stuff. You’ve dreamed your whole life up to now of doing
something: seeing the pyramids, being an astronaut, buying that certain car,
marrying that girl, making that amount of salary. And then one day, you realize
that you probably—or certainly—never will. That’s just not the way your life can
go now. You missed the turn. Whether through active choices or passive ones,
you wound up at this little spot on the map of your life that reads YOU ARE
HERE.
I had one of those days recently. I
took a look at one of my dreams and noticed that if I’d really wanted that, I should have made a different choice or two
(or ten) half a decade ago. It’s a little late now.
This may be what they call a
mid-life crisis. If it is, I hit it early (just like my birth.) Or I’m only
going to live into my fifties. (Either is quite possible, if you think about it.)
And these missed turns on the road
of your life don’t generally come along on sunny days as you travel a bucolic
byway beneath a few wooly clouds and flash a grin at the flabbergasted bunnies
by the culvert. You’d notice then. They come in the sleet storms, thieving fingers
of wind striving to steal your hat from your head and breath from your lungs,
two raindrops tickling coldly down the back of your neck. You haven’t seen the
sun for days, it seems, and even God is silent when you stop to ask for
directions.
To change the metaphor, it’s like
living in a novel. There comes a point
in every good story when things get hard and dangerous, wild and wooly. The
hero goes down for the count (and it’s usually his own fault). And if you’re
not one of those heretics who skip to the end of the book first, you almost don’t
want to keep reading; because there is no way under heaven it’s going to turn
out like you hope it will. The sea pours into the dike. The plane’s engines
start to cough. Edmund heads off with the White Witch. Frodo lies still under
the cliffs of Cirith Ungol. Bigwig is in the wire. David stares at Uriah with
fear and frustration and murder in his heart. Adam grasps a fruit in
desperation.
God hangs on a cross.
One of my favorite words as a
ten-year-old was antepenultimate. (æn.ti.pəˈnʌl.ti.mət) It’s
Latin based, an adjective, and basically means “the thing before the thing
before the last thing.” For example, Thursday is the antepenultimate day of the
week. The twenty-ninth is the antepenultimate day of July. And after the
antepenultimate, comes the penultimate.
In a good novel, you have at least one antepenultimate build-up, a penultimate
crisis, and the final, crashing resolution. In a really good one, you have several.
In one sense, all of human life is
the Antepenultimate. From the first squalling breath to the last shuddering
gasp, every son of Adam and daughter of Eve lives in the crisis. We ride the
shock waves, travel the journeys, and generally wind up nowhere near where we
wanted to go ten years ago. If we had
known our current destinations a decade ago, we’d be terrified, disappointed,
or both; no matter how good (or terrible) it would seem. We’d probably be so
worried about how to achieve (or miss) this spot on the map that we’d freeze.
It’s not really good to know that you’re in the crisis part of the novel as a
character...it tends to chill the blood.
And wherever you wind up,
eventually comes the greatest crisis. Death, the Penultimate Event. If you
cross that bridge, your GPS has no way to recalculate your route. One way only.
But then you reach your Ultimate (in
both senses) destination. And once you’ve made it there, the route you’ve taken—missed
side roads, exits, gas stations, and all—will make perfect sense. It will,
literally, be the only road you could have taken to get Home. You climb out of
the car, stretch, and grin in sheer, tension-melting relief.
Made it.
Remember that the next time you
missed a turn.
