sweet spot of life

I think I've reached a certain sweet spot in life. I've got the hang of a lot of things by now. I hardly ever cut myself when slicing vegetables or fruit, and may be at my top speed. I've practiced things like that a lot -- over 50 years, I suppose. And I'm not yet wobbly in a dangerous way. That's not so far off, I know. There will come a time, should I be lucky enough to live that long, when I am as unsure with a knife as when I was four.

Right now, though, this is a great place to be.

It's small things. I rarely misbutton my shirts, something that used to happen pretty often in the early days, when you think about it. You get to the bottom of the shirt, and ah geez, you're off by one button. Not in your 50s, my friend. We are Competent. Also, you learn to gloss over the times when these things do happen. They just blend in with the many more times when you have buttoned successfully over the years, and at long last the ratio has become overwhelmingly in favor of a positive buttoning experience.

I'm savoring this era. You know stuff. Like how to pull the hose around a corner without hurting the hosta. How to install shades. How to flick gunk off a pan, right into the sink. How to repair a broken cup, or to recognize when it's truly a goner. Come to think of it, a lot of the competency of this life phase has to do with knowing when something is a goner and when it might be saved once more. The cup, the gizmo, the roof, the favorite shirt. I know exactly when to give up on a strand of floss and take another.

How often do you get to sit at a sweet spot? For me, hardly ever. I generally tip one way or another. Watching the Olympics last night I noticed I couldn't make my way to that particular sweet spot where you care enough about the competition to make it exciting to watch but don't care so much that you feel anxious. I just tipped straight into anxiety. For all of the athletes. And their parents! Oh my god. There were some shots of parents watching their kids do gymnastics, and it was agonizing to watch their agony. That one mom looked like she was going to birth an alien right there in the bleachers.

No thanks to that kind of excitement. But today we were watching some other competition, when suddenly the crowd, and Laura, cheered wildly. "What happened?" I asked Laura. "That guy just scored!" I had moved so far from the sweet spot that I had forgotten to care what was happening. It became as sports events generally are for me -- like watching a fish tank. It's kind of relaxing, but you forget to notice when someone scores, or wins. If you start to really pay attention, you worry about everyone and how badly they want to win, how hard they are trying. There is no sweet spot for me in the wide world of sports.

So I have to focus on my own fleeting experience of an existential sweet spot. I know how to do most of what I need to know how to do, and I either don't screw it up or the screw up gets absorbed into the much larger database of "I've got this" experiences. It's not forever, but it's here now. How sweet is that?