#125. Halfway!

There comes a point in our third chapter when the arithmetic is difficult to ignore. Unless we are truly Blue Zone people, most of us are more than halfway through our lives.

A reader recently remarked: there is now more in the rearview mirror than out over the dash.

Which got me thinking about road trips.

When I was a kid, family vacations meant piling everybody into the car. Air travel was far too expensive, so Mom and Dad took the front seats and the three of us kids clambered into the back.

Territory was clearly demarcated. There were borders and rules. Nobody wanted to be stuck in the dreaded middle seat for the whole trip. We had a time-stamped rotation system prominently displayed so each child could move out of the middle fair and square.

Even as children, we were unwilling to accept an inequitable distribution of back-seat real estate.

Inevitably, someone behind Mom and Dad would ask: “Are we there yet?”

My father always cheerily replied: “Halfway!”

It didn't matter where we were. It didn't matter how long we'd been driving. We were halfway.

Which may have satisfied Dad, but he had three smart-assed kids behind him with a functioning concept of both time and arithmetic.

Because 43 minutes later, when someone asked again and got the same answer—“Halfway!”—we knew something was seriously wrong with his methodology. Surely by now we were halfway minus 43 minutes.

All these years later, the follow-up is clearer: Halfway to what? And what exactly are we measuring?

For most of our lives, we have had plenty of ways to measure where we are. Age, sure. But also degrees, jobs, promotions, salaries, houses, relationships, children, mortgages, retirement accounts. Milestones scattered along the road, reassuring us that we were getting somewhere.

By our 50s and beyond, the measuring gets murkier. If we measure only in years, the answer is pretty clear. Halfway is almost certainly behind us. So yes, there probably is more road in the rearview mirror than we see stretching out over the dash.

Suddenly, Dad's dubious measurement system looks more interesting. Maybe the question isn't whether we are halfway. I think it's what we choose to measure from here.

One of this chapter’s freedoms is that we get to change the measuring stick.

We don't have to count our lives only in years remaining or milestones achieved. We can measure curiosity. Connection. Courage. Things created. Wisdom shared. Minds changed—including our own. Days when we paid attention instead of simply getting through them.

Which brings me back to Dad. As kids, hearing “Halfway!” produced a chorus of groans. It meant we still had SO FAR to go.

Today, if someone could guarantee me I was halfway, I'd be delighted. Of course, they can't.

But Dad's answer still works—not as a measure of time, but as a way of looking through the windshield.

“Are we there yet?”

Halfway.