Two years from now, I turn seventy. I have questions. Hell, I always have questions. I recently read that our current years move and change so fast that each year is equivalent to one hundred years of the past. Or maybe it just feels that way.
So here they are. A list of questions I genuinely don’t know the answer to yet. And I’m not sure they will even be relevant if the two years are truly like two hundred.
- Am I still alive? The big one. The only one that makes all the others possible or irrelevant. I ask it without flinching now, the way I couldn’t at twenty-eight.
- How do you feel after five years of life in Barcelona? Did it stay the seductive city I thought it was, or did the new wear off and it quietly become just the place I live?
- Did sex get even better and more open? I mean that seriously. Is it better? Deeper, freer, more honest and open than it is right now, or did seventy find me telling myself a story about decline and regret because that’s the story we are handed?
- Did one of my books go viral? Or did they find the readers they were meant to find, quietly, one at a time, the way most true things travel? I’d take either. I’d like to know which.
- ¿Qué tal tu español? Are you fluent enough to dream in it, or still speaking the charming stumble of an older man who moved somewhere on love and nerve rather than language?
- Are you more European or more American? Or did that question stop mattering the way I suspect it will? Maybe by seventy I’ll have become something that doesn’t need a passport to describe it.
- Is Trump dead, gone, or both? It is 2028 and past time for him to be gone. I genuinely want to know what my birth country looks like on the other side of him. And if America survived.
- Did you reach your financial goals? With the US dollar’s value eroding and the economic turmoil across the world, did the plan your financial manager, John, and you made together work out? Will you have enough money if you live to age 104 as predicted by livingto100.com? Holy shit, did I just ask that?
- Are you still in the city, or did you move to the Spanish countryside? Barcelona gave you energy you didn’t know you still had. Seventy might want quiet and solitude instead. I have no idea which hunger will win.
- How do you plan to live and enjoy the next five years? You are in the last five years of the Enjoyment Stage (70-75) in your Theory of Being. Meaning: have you made an actual plan, or did you do what I’ve always done and simply follow the next true thing? I suspect I already know the answer to this one.
- What age would you be if you didn’t know you were seventy? This is the real question underneath all the others. Strip away the number. What does the body, mind, soul and spirit say? What does the appetite say? What does the curiosity say? I want to know if the number and the man ever ever stopped agreeing.
- How many books have you written? Is The Quest still the one you consider your life’s work? Is The Mysteries of Barcelona still your most fun creation? Or has more magic happened?
- What happened with AI? Did it take over the world? Did it make us immortal? Or is the world now like the movie Backrooms?
- Are you even more candid and uncensored? Is that even possible?
- Are you living up to our life mantra? Integrating sensuality, curiosity, intimacy, and freedom daily? Cultivating the qualities needed for age seventy and beyond: resilience, serenity, equanimity, and transcendence?
- Did you reverse age? Did you get a hair transplant and a neck lift? Did you lose that extra twenty pounds?
- Did your girls reconcile with you? It’s been seventeen years now. Or do they continue to live a life imprisoned by hatred and resentment? You know you have done everything you possibly can.
- Does anyone really know what time it is?
I have a million others, but let’s just leave it here. Seventy gets a plethora of open doors instead, and whatever two more years of living life brings when I actually walk through them.
Let’s see what happens. It will be fun to look back at this. Hopefully.
— R.
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