The Climb

What if age were less about the passing of years than the ways they gather, unfold, and come into view?

Some people see life as a struggle. Others as a journey. I tend to think of mine as a book, which is perhaps an occupational hazard. There are chapters, recurring characters, passages whose significance only becomes apparent much later. In my last year of life, there were plot developments I would have sent back to the author as excessive.

But a book is how I make sense of a life when I can sit a little distance from it. Inside the living of it, I see something else.

I see the climb.

Allow me to explain.

Today I am forty-six. This tells you how long I have been alive, although surprisingly little about the life. There is a saying that there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. The calendar, presumably, disputes this.

A week is a week. A day is a day. An hour is an hour.

You may feel you have lived three lifetimes by Thursday. This does not entitle you to retire on Friday. Nor is there an overtime rate for living through a decade in a fortnight.

A life, however, has very little respect for these arrangements.

There are afternoons that require more telling than entire stretches of years. A few words can divide a life into before and after, leaving decades on either side of a conversation that lasted twenty minutes. Memory gives the afternoon its own country and can fold entire years into the space between two sentences.

Other changes happen so quietly that they are already part of us before we think to ask when they began. A place becomes familiar enough to miss. A language once heard as a stream of unfamiliar sounds becomes one in which somebody can make us laugh. Someone who was once a stranger becomes the person whose absence would alter the shape of every room.

We can date a wedding. It is harder to date the moment another human being became your home.

The years hold these sudden crossings and gradual arrivals without distinguishing between them. On a calendar, the day that changed everything occupies precisely the same space as the day we cannot remember.

Chronology puts things in order. It cannot quite tell us their size. Forty-six years will fit into a small box on a form, but the distance inside them requires a different scale.

And for that, I have the climb.

Sometimes I picture myself on a cliff like El Capitan, halfway up something indecently vertical. My face is so close to the rock that I can distinguish the grains within it: the pale flecks, the dark seams, the fine edge of a fracture where a little more might come away. Sweat gathers above my eyebrows and slips into my eyes. I blink against the salt. My fingers ache around a hold I cannot quite trust, and one foot rests on a ledge whose qualifications for the job seem questionable at best.

I know this small patch of stone intimately. I know where it is rough enough to hold me and where it has worn smooth. I have examined the same crack from every angle available to a person who cannot move very far. There is dust against my skin. There is the sound of my own breathing. Above me, the cliff continues out of sight.

This is how well I can know a worry, or whatever has drawn me into hyperfocus. Every grain of it. Every small variation in the surface. I can follow its fault lines in the dark, feel where it might split, return to the same doubtful place and test it again. From a distance, someone might see a woman halfway up a mountain. Look how far she has come!

From where I am, the question is whether this particular piece of rock will hold.

It is an urgent question, large enough to fill my field of vision.

Or I look up. There is so much farther to go. Can I make it?

And then, occasionally, something catches me.

In the middle of an ordinary day, the Baltic will be blue in a way that stops whatever I was thinking. Light spreads across the water towards a horizon I have become accustomed to living beside, and for a moment its familiarity falls away. I grew up landlocked. Somewhere inside me, the sea still belongs to an elsewhere that is exotic.

And here it is.

Here I am.

The distance opens before I have thought to look for it. It is as though I have leaned back from the cliff and the rope has taken my weight. The stone recedes. Air enters the space around me. There is a world beyond the few inches I have been studying so closely.

The view generally neglects to make an appointment. But when it comes, I stop for it.

When I am frustrated about living abroad, I sometimes imagine explaining my life to the girl I was at ten. She lived in a small town in Pennsylvania and so wanted to see other places. Elsewhere was an enormous word, large enough to hold everything she had yet to encounter. She had never been on an airplane. She knew so little about what the world contained, and wanted so much to get to it.

Today, I would tell her that I live on an archipelago in the Baltic Sea. I might begin to explain the complications, try to find the words a ten year old could understand. I suspect she would still be occupied with the island.

You live there!?

I could give her a careful account of homesickness, of the strange ache one sometimes has of having made a life far from where it began. But she would hear that I had actually gone. A place she could only imagine reaching had become somewhere from which I could miss somewhere else. And that it was normal, not a trip, not a short-term stint.

Maybe then she would hear me speak Swedish.

Words that would once have passed through me without meaning can now carry a joke, an argument, an instruction to a child. I can follow them without stopping to marvel that I understand. I can even be thoroughly bored in a language I once could not speak. The exchange brochures tend to omit this eventual achievement.

She would hear the wonder before she heard what the conversation was about.

And I would tell her that someone loved me enough to marry me. I think she would linger there, too. Before love acquired the familiarity of a shared life, there was the question of whether it would happen at all. She would want to know about him. I would have to explain that the future had become a family, that there were four children, identical twins even. That people she could not yet imagine were now inseparable from the person she would become.

From where she stands, it is an astonishing life.

She would undoubtedly think I was amazing.

I know what remains uncertain, what has cost too much, what I still need and have not found. I know where the rock is crumbling. She looks from the world I knew at ten, when this life was almost too far away to imagine. She can see a height I mostly experience as difficulty.

I have carried her here in my heart, with that first horizon still in her untested eyes.

People generally speak of being ten as though ten were a place we left when we turned eleven. Birthdays encourage this tidy succession: one age finished, another begun. But an earlier fear can find me without consulting the calendar. So can an old delight. A voice, a word, the possibility of going somewhere I have never been, and a younger part of me is suddenly listening.

Forty-six contains every age I have ever been. They have changed in the carrying, as I have, but I have not outgrown them into nonexistence. The girl who wanted a larger world is still here inside the woman who knows what it costs to live in one. Sometimes I think it is she who first notices when the view opens.

It can happen over something I am eating, a taste that entered my life only because I came here. Something once unknown has become familiar enough to want again. For a moment, I can almost feel the branching of the years: another decision, another country, and I might never have known to miss this.

Friendship has that strangeness, too. I can look at a friend and be caught by the thought that there is a perfectly plausible version of my life in which we never met. All the distance I travelled, all the circumstances that could have fallen differently, and here is this person whose company has become part of an ordinary day. It is a precarious arrangement, the way someone can begin as an accident of geography and become someone you would cross it for.

At a traditional Christmas market, the lights gather against the early dark. People draw closer to the stalls, faces briefly bright beneath the lamps; beyond them, the evening deepens. I can be in the middle of it before I realise how far I am from the girl for whom places like this belonged to pictures. For a moment, I am both the person moving through the scene and the child who cannot believe she has gotten inside it.

For someone beside me, this Christmas market may simply be a typical December routine. But I have also known my grandmother’s cookies, my family’s traditions, the Christmases of a childhood these people never shared. And now I have this, too: these lights, this place, the elsewhere I once dreamed of.

I get to stand in one world with another still alive inside me.

My life is the particular way these worlds meet.

Then ordinary life closes around the moment again. There is something to buy, a kid yelling for me, or somewhere to be. Whatever was worrying me may still be waiting when I turn back. It is very reliable that way.

The beauty does not settle the difficulty. I would still like the doubtful hold to be secure. There are stretches of this climb I would gladly have been spared, and no view requires me to declare them necessary. I can love where some of the years have brought me and still wish they had been kinder in the bringing.

I would like more kindness ahead. There are things I want that I cannot provide for myself, possibilities that depend on someone else answering, room that another person must make. I would like the coming year to bring something towards me, too. Admiring how far I have climbed does not exhaust what I am allowed to ask of a life.

But the view keeps finding ways through, including in places where there is nothing much to see.

My son Matthias wakes from a nightmare and comes into our bed. He crawls in beside me, carrying the last of his fright, and presses close. I make room. He settles into it with the unquestioning confidence of someone whose spatial requirements are another person’s problem.

And then there is his warmth against me. The weight of him. The small, gradual change in his breathing as the nightmare loosens its grip and he returns to sleep for the night’s remaining hours.

I lie there with a whole person tucked against me, someone who once did not exist and now comes looking for me in the dark. There was a time when I could not have imagined his face. Now he is so familiar that I can hold him without needing to see it.

The girl who wondered whether she would be loved could not have pictured this particular child, this particular weight beneath the covers. Neither could I, even much later. There are things the future brings for which wanting is too small a preparation.

And here is one of them, asleep beside me.

The climb will still be there in a few hours. I will recognise every grain of the rock. But for now, without having meant to, I have caught sight of the life around it.

I am forty-six, lying in the dark with my son. I am also ten, astonished by the life I have somehow grown into. All these years have brought us to the same pair of eyes.

Just look where we are.