The problem with it all is that you get no choice in the matter. Things have begun before you even know it, and by the time you do gain self-awareness, you are too far along to do much of anything except just keep going. Or else. And who ever picks else? Nobody. That’s who. Me? I’m fifty-five, and I’ve just found all this out.

I’m divorced. Recently unemployed, and by force rather than whim. Two kids who I never see and who never remember my birthday. When people ask what I do, I tell them I’ve been recently immersed in the art of breathing, and they chuckle. They don’t know that was first said by some snooty french painter. I just read it somewhere.

There’s these monks, they call them Marathon Monks. They run this 25,000 mile course in these mountains called the Hiei mountains around Kyoto on a quest for ‘spiritual enlightenment’. That’s the equivalent of a full trip around the world. Took the last guy who did it seven years to complete it. Can you imagine that? Seven years of running?

The past seven years, I’ve started to do what I like to call Old Man Things. Things one does when one gets old and retired. I go on early morning jogs and late evening walks. I read the local newpaper and write letters to the editor which never get published. I do the crossword. I took up fixing things and making things. The gutters still leak though, and it took me seven tries to build a simple little newspaper stand in my basement workshop, a stand which I quickly filled with finished crossword puzzles. I tried to get into cooking, but never really managed to put my heart into it, so I’m not sure if that would have been my passion or not. Because that’s what all the Old Man Things are, really, are just things to fill time and space. Things to be not-void. Things to inhabit and occupy to the areas in one’s life, until one can find a true passion. A calling. A reason.

These monks. They wear only a simple, thin robe. A hat and some sandals, both made out of straw. They woke up, put that stuff on, and knew that it would be on their backs for the next seven years. The next 25,000 miles. Running on mountain trails, scrabbbling across scree, sun in their faces, then at their backs. Only forty-seven monks have ever survived the trek, which dates back to seven-hundred-something.

My friends have thinned as I’ve aged. That’s just the way of things. When we start in this life, we have four hands to help us up: two from our father, and two from our mother. And we are lucky to get those four hands. We have to find more as we go. We befriend the people scrabbling at our ankles when we pull them up to our level, and in turn they’ll drag us up the next rung. At some point, people stop and look down and realize that they are now at the place that they first knew as horizon when they came screaming from the wound between their mother’s legs. And they content themselves to stay where they have arrived, and thus they help fewer people climb. All their peers keep climbing, and the only people passing through their space then are those who started when they saw the dust from all those other heels rising into the wind.

Me? I think I’ve still been trying to climb. Lord knows I still have responsibilities and chores, so I must still serve some purpose to this great, grand machination called life. But what really tells me that I must still be climbing is the enlightenment. I haven’t achieved enlightenment, yet.

When I was a kid, and I saw people the age that I am now, I always felt a subconscious fear, a subtle twinge in my spine that sent a whispered but urgent message to my attentive brain, and that message was don’t ever grow so old. Because people the age that I am now seemed so decayed and eroded, back then, what with the lines and creases weathering their tanned faces and gnarled hands.

These monks, most of the time they can’t make it. Not everyone achieves enlightenment. Some are those people I told you about, my thinned out circle of friends, people who have reached a point close enough to the apex that they are content to spread their metaphoric picnic blanket and nap beneath the shadow of the peaks. But these monks, this Tendai sect, they often reach a point where they can run no further. I imagine they look out beyond themselves, at all those sandalprints in the road, and then they look ahead of themselves, where the sun is likely setting. Perhaps it has already fallen.

Tradition holds that a monk who cannot make it back to the temple must take his own life. If they cannot return to the temple, Enryakuji Hoshuin, they are to commit suicide by hanging or disembowelment.

In the morning, after I’ve had my morning wedge of grapefruit, and my one and a half cups of decaf, and my pills (always the pills) I stand in front of my closet, Hands running among suits I used to wear to work, T-shirts I used to wear underneath. Now, all my shoes except my slippers and my comfortable sneakers are in a mangled pile, Gucci corpses stacked high against the back wall of the walk-in next to my wife’s abandoned Tahari handbags. My watches, Tourneau and Cartier, gently tick away the days on a shelf. I never wear them anymore. I run my hands across silken ties, and I think about those monks, high on their mountain trails, their thoughts turned towards enlightenment. I think they dream about their homecoming, about their brothers draping blossoms at their feet and bowing to receive the blessings of a newly enlightened one.

Surrounded by my old silk and my old leather and the light from the naked bulb in my closet, I think about the monks who never make it, and I know what they think about, too.