The Wall With No Door

There is a particular kind of regret that does not announce itself until the body refuses to cooperate, and by then it is too late to do anything about it except sit with it.

I have been thinking lately about old people I have known, and about the look that crosses a face when the mind still wants to reach for something and the hand can no longer get there. Not the dramatic regrets — the unsaid apology, the unforgiven slight — those you can still attempt, in a letter, in a phone call, in a wheeled trip across town. I mean the regrets that are welded to the physical. the dance you never learned because you were afraid of looking foolish, and now the knees will not allow the lesson. The mountain you kept postponing because there would always be a next year, and now the next year has arrived but the lungs have not. The ocean you meant to swim in, the stranger you meant to kiss, the room you meant to walk into with your shoulders back and your real name in your mouth — and now the door is still there but the legs that would carry you through it have given their notice.

These are the cruelest regrets because they cannot be redone. You cannot apologize to a body for starving it. You cannot make amends to a life you declined to actually live. The thing you didn't do becomes, eventually, the thing you can't do, and that is a wall with no door.

Here is what worries me, and it is not a small worry. I think the youngest among us are signing up for a surplus of this particular regret, and they are doing it on purpose, and they do not know it yet. They are choosing the screen over the room. They are choosing the like over the touch. They are opting out of the awkward, the sweaty, the embarrassed, the rejected, the sunburned, the lost, the late, the too-loud, the too-much — opting out of the entire physical texture of being alive — in exchange for a curated, frictionless, painless approximation of a life. A life with the sharp edges filed off. A life watched rather than lived.

And here is the part I think we forget, and it is the whole point. we did not come here to be comfortable. We came here — to the meat, to the gravity, to the bruised shins and the sun in the eyes — because comfort is available in a hundred non-physical forms and it was never enough. We chose to be human precisely because being human hurts. Because the body is the instrument through which joy is possible at all, and joy, the real kind, the kind that changes you, does not come without its toll of pain and risk and vulnerability. The kiss that means something is also the kiss that can be refused. The dance that makes the night is also the dance where you step on someone's foot. To delete the possibility of the one is to delete the possibility of the other. You cannot file your way to a meaningful life.

So here is my fear for the cowering generation, said plainly. that they will arrive at the age where the body finally presents its bill, and they will look back on a youth spent entirely in the safe glow, and they will have nothing to regret and nothing to remember, and the nothing will be the regret. They will have spent the years in which the body was capable of everything doing approximately nothing with it, and the wall — the one with no door — will be made entirely of all the things they were too frightened to try.

The point of being young and housed in a working body is to break it in beautifully. To use it until it is used up. To collect a generous, messy archive of attempts — the kiss, the climb, the fight, the fall, the walk home at four in the morning with a torn jacket and a story — so that when the body finally says 'no more,' you have something to sit with. Something that was worth the sitting.

Do not let them hand you a youth where the only thing you touched was glass.