We often speak about life as though it were waiting patiently for us to become ready.
We will begin when work becomes quieter.
We will travel when circumstances are better.
We will contact that person when we have more time.
We will start the project when everything is properly organised, the finances are secure, the weather improves and the garage has finally been cleared.
There is always a reason to wait.
Many of the reasons are perfectly sensible.
That is what makes them so dangerous.
Life does not usually disappear because of one reckless decision. It can disappear while we are being entirely reasonable.
The Perfect Time Has Poor Attendance
I have spent much of my life starting projects.
One thing I have learned is that the perfect moment rarely arrives on schedule.
There is nearly always something missing: money, certainty, time, assistance or the approval of people who were never going to approve in the first place.
If we insist on having every answer before beginning, we may become exceptionally well prepared for something we never do.
In my experience, substantial projects usually take longer and cost more than you expect.
Had I known every difficulty in advance, I might never have started some of the things I am most pleased to have done.
That is not an argument for ignoring costs. It is an admission that we rarely understand the whole journey while standing at the beginning.
But not every new beginning is a major project. Learning a language, taking up an instrument, returning to education or training for a challenge we once considered beyond us may require commitment without requiring us to reorganise our entire lives.
We do not have to solve every future difficulty before taking the first step.
Planning matters. I believe in it. A good plan can prevent expensive mistakes and help us recognise which difficulties deserve our attention.
But planning can also become a sophisticated form of hiding.
There is always one more document to prepare, one more opinion to obtain and one more drawer that apparently must be organised before a man can begin writing a book, building a business or changing his life.
The drawer has no interest in his future.
It will still be there afterwards.
We Think We Have More Time
When we are young, time feels almost unlimited.
A year is a significant part of a child’s life. Later, years begin to move with suspicious speed. Christmas decorations seem to be taken down only so that someone can put them up again.
At twenty, postponing something for five years can feel harmless.
After fifty, five years have a different weight.
Yet they can pass faster than we expect. Something we meant to begin last year turns out to have been waiting for ten.
That is what strikes me so strongly in Pink Floyd’s Time: waiting for someone or something to show us the way, then discovering how many years have passed while we waited.
Nobody told us when to begin.
Perhaps we assumed somebody would.
We are used to being told what comes next—at school, at work and through the expectations of people around us. But nobody is responsible for announcing that now is the time to do what we ourselves have wanted to do.
The song then becomes more uncomfortable. We try to catch up, but running faster cannot recover the years. Meanwhile, the body grows older and the time ahead grows shorter.
That is not an abstract thought at my age.
Some opportunities I once had are gone. Others are still here, but I cannot assume they will remain available indefinitely.
That does not mean we should live in fear or behave as though death is waiting behind the next lamp post. Constant awareness of mortality is not always inspiring. It can become exhausting, and it ruins a perfectly good breakfast.
But we should understand the arithmetic.
There are fewer summers ahead than there were behind us.
That makes each one more valuable, not less.
Age should not turn every ordinary day into a desperate race against the clock. It should simply make us more careful about giving entire years to things that no longer matter.
Waiting Can Become an Identity
Some people are always about to begin.
They are going to write, travel, learn, build, repair, leave, return or finally tell someone what needs to be said.
Their future is full of activity.
Their present is largely administrative.
Eventually, later becomes part of who they are.
This is not always laziness. Fear can disguise itself as patience. Perfectionism can disguise itself as high standards. Uncertainty can disguise itself as further research.
I understand all three.
A man may say he is waiting for the right moment when he is actually waiting for a guarantee.
There are very few guarantees available.
Even warranties on household appliances now appear to contain seventeen pages explaining why the particular failure you have experienced is not covered.
Life offers considerably less paperwork.
Many years ago, a superior was criticising me for something I had done. He was considerably less active when it came to doing anything himself.
I told him that men who never cross the street never get hit by a car.
My point was simple. If I crossed a hundred times, perhaps I would get hit once. But I would still have made it across ninety-nine times. He could remain safely on the pavement, criticising the collision, without ever having gone anywhere himself.
It is easy to have an unblemished record when there is very little on it.
That does not make every decision of mine right. It does mean that an occasional failure has to be considered alongside what a person has actually attempted and achieved.
We make the best judgement we can, then step forward without knowing everything.
That is not recklessness.
That is how nearly every meaningful beginning works.
After Fifty Is Not the Waiting Room
There is a persistent idea that life after fifty should gradually become smaller.
By then, we are supposed to know who we are, what we do and where we belong. Major experiments should be behind us. We may maintain what we have built, perhaps improve the garden and try not to injure ourselves opening a jar.
New beginnings are treated as the property of younger people.
I do not accept that.
A younger person may have more years ahead, but an older person often has something equally valuable: experience, judgement and a clearer understanding of what is not worth pursuing.
We have made enough mistakes to recognise some of them before repeating them.
Not all of them, obviously. It would be arrogant to deprive ourselves of every future mistake.
But we know more about our strengths, our limitations and the kinds of people with whom we should—or should not—attempt to build something.
Starting later is not the same as starting too late.
At sixty-seven, I am not interested in living as though the important part of my life has already happened.
That does not mean denying age.
It means refusing to confuse age with completion.
The Things We Leave Unsaid
Life does not wait in relationships either.
We assume there will be another opportunity to speak honestly, repair an argument, thank someone or say goodbye properly.
Sometimes there is.
Sometimes there is not.
Men are particularly good at postponing conversations that appear emotionally complicated. We tell ourselves that the other person probably knows what we think.
Perhaps they do.
It is still useful to hear it.
We do not have to turn every friendship into a weekly examination of our inner world. Men often communicate through loyalty, humour, practical help and simply being present. There is real value in that.
But occasionally words are necessary.
“I was wrong.”
“I need help.”
“I have missed you.”
“I am proud of you.”
These are short sentences. None requires a PowerPoint presentation.
Yet some men will rebuild an entire garden wall to avoid saying one of them.
The wall may look excellent.
The problem remains.
There Is No Final Version of Us
We tend to think of identity as something fixed.
I am a doctor. A father. A husband. A manager. The person who solves the problem. The person other people call.
These roles matter, but life changes them.
Children grow up. Careers alter or end. Relationships change. Parents die. Institutions we helped build continue without us—or occasionally pretend they built themselves.
If our entire identity depends on one role, its loss can make us feel that we have disappeared with it.
But a human life is not a job description.
We are allowed to become something else.
We are allowed to develop new interests, build new relationships and begin work whose eventual outcome we may never fully control.
We are even allowed to surprise people who thought they had already understood us.
Perhaps especially those people.
Beginning Without Knowing the Ending
Nordic Wolves is one such beginning for me.
I do not know exactly where it will lead.
It may connect people who would otherwise have remained isolated. It may encourage someone to take better care of himself, begin a conversation, recover an old interest or try something he had postponed.
It may develop in directions I have not yet imagined.
Or perhaps it will lead to very little beyond what writing it has already given me.
That would also be all right.
Putting my experience into words, questioning my own conclusions and creating something I wanted to exist are worthwhile in themselves. I hope these articles will matter to other people. But they do not become meaningless if their greatest importance turns out to be in my own life.
Pink Floyd’s Learning to Fly belongs here for me.
Where Time makes me confront what has passed, Learning to Fly makes me think about what it feels like to attempt something unfamiliar: the attraction, the uncertainty and the knowledge that wanting to do it is not quite the same as knowing how.
Experience helps. It does not remove the need to learn.
An older man can know a great deal and still be a beginner at something that matters to him.
That uncertainty is not a flaw in the project.
It is part of what makes it alive.
We often want to know the ending before we permit ourselves to begin. But if the ending is already fully known, we are not creating anything. We are following instructions.
A worthwhile project changes as people enter it. New questions appear. One article leads to another. Readers see things the writer missed. Experience modifies conviction.
The first ideas do not have to contain every future idea.
There must be room left in the house.
Otherwise, nobody new can enter.
Not Everything Must Be Finished
There is also freedom in accepting that we will not finish everything.
Some projects will outgrow us. Some questions will remain unanswered. Some places will stay unvisited, books unwritten and arguments unresolved.
That is not proof that life has failed.
A full life is not one in which every box has been ticked.
If I ever reach the point where there is nothing left to consider, question, build or write about, it will not mean I have achieved perfect wisdom.
It will probably mean somebody should check my pulse.
There should always be unfinished business—not the destructive kind that keeps us trapped in the past, but the living kind that pulls us towards tomorrow.
A new journey.
A new article.
A new idea that is still slightly unreasonable.
The Calendar Keeps Moving
Dates matter.
They help us turn intention into action. “One day” is difficult to locate on a calendar. Tuesday morning is more useful.
A deadline can be irritating, but it forces an idea to leave the safety of imagination and meet the real world.
The real world will immediately point out everything that is wrong with it.
That is fine.
Once something exists, it can be improved. A project that remains permanently inside our head may be flawless, but it is of little practical value to anyone else—or to ourselves, if we never do anything with it.
There is an Icelandic saying that a task begun is half done.
Anyone who has renovated a house may wish to dispute the fraction.
But the important part is true: once we have begun, we have something to work on. We can discover what is missing, correct what is wrong and take the next step.
We should not wait until we are free from doubt.
We should begin when the idea matters enough that we are willing to proceed despite doubt.
Courage is often less dramatic than people imagine. It may simply consist of sending the message, booking the journey, opening the document or pressing the button marked Publish.
The heart does not always race.
Sometimes the computer merely asks, “Are you sure?”
No, we are not entirely sure.
Press it anyway.
This Is Not a Conclusion
There is a temptation to make every final article in a series sound like a farewell.
This is not one.
There are more subjects to explore, more stories to tell and probably more opinions that will get me into trouble.
The purpose of these first articles is not to empty every cupboard and announce that nothing remains.
They are an opening.
If people find something useful in them, the conversation can continue. If readers disagree, that may also be useful. Agreement is comfortable, but it rarely produces the most interesting discussion.
I do not know how many articles will follow or exactly what shape Nordic Wolves will eventually take.
I know only that waiting for complete certainty would have ensured that none of it existed.
While We Are Still Here
Life waits for no one.
That sentence can sound threatening, but I do not hear it that way.
I hear an invitation.
Use the time that is still ours.
Begin something.
Return to something.
Call someone.
Go somewhere.
Make the plan, but do not spend the rest of your life improving it without ever putting it into action.
We do not need to live frantically or treat every day as a heroic final chapter. Most days will remain wonderfully ordinary. We will drink coffee, lose our keys, answer messages and wonder why we entered a particular room.
That ordinary life is not what delays the real one.
It is the real one.
The task is not to escape it, but to remain awake inside it.
None of us knows how much time remains.
But while we are here, the future is not closed.
There is still another move to make.