fifty-three

August 31—my birthday. I'm 53 today. If I'm not mistaken, 53 is a prime number. I always feel a bit weird whenever I reach a prime-number age. Up to 100, the next prime numbers are 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, and 97. How many more of those can I reach?

A friend just texted that 53 is, at least, better than 63. Heh. Ask me again in ten years how I feel about that. All I can say is that, even now, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I watch all these YouTube videos about welding, bladesmithing, and wood-turning, and I think to myself that it might be fulfilling to work with my hands while I'm still able. But I'd also like to be an accomplished writer. Or actor. Or cartoonist. Or architect. I think back to the advice I was given by Mr. Park, the temperamental CEO of SsangYong Paper Company, back in the 1990s when I temped there: whatever you do, dig a deep well. Mr. Park had given the analogy of the man who digs many shallow wells in search of water, never finding it. It's the man who digs a single deep well, by contrast, who gets the water. I recall inwardly smirking at the advice at the time; I was a stupid kid in my twenties back then. But I see the wisdom in the advice now, even if Mr. Park himself was a constantly angry son of a bitch.

Anyway, life is lived forward, not backward, so here, at 53, all I can do is soldier on. I often joke to people that I'll be dead by 60, and after having a stroke last year, I sometime wonder whether the matter is really a joke. Both sides of my family have histories of heart disease and other problems; we're not a very long-lived branch of humanity. And for years, I've pondered—on some level—the fact of my own mortality, which may be one reason why Buddhism appeals to me: it stares in the face of impermanence as it searches for answers. In the end, all we have is this moment, so even as I live life forward, I need to remain rooted in the here and now. We'll see soon enough what lies ahead: the river of time carries us ever forward.