Sleepwalking Home to Adulthood

Flying Dream 1.

This song is called “Sleepwalk Home.” I recorded it in 2008 in the living room of my friend JP’s apartment on Harrison Street (that’s him saying “yeah I guess” at the beginning and playing bass throughout).

Midlife is a strange period in terms of understanding the passage of time and where we are in our development.

Sometimes I feel old.

The number of years I’ve been on earth is staggering; I have memories with friends (like JP, who I wrote the song in this post with) from 30 years ago, and I was already a teenager back then.

On the other hand, this is a time of change and transition. I’m learning new ways of thinking and feeling and being; it makes me feel like I’m a teenager again now in some ways.

Then there are the social realities that mark certain periods of our lives.

I had a lovely dinner with my thesis adviser last night and he was talking about reaching an age where one’s friends and acquaintances start to die.

I also have younger friends for whom summer is a fun but exhausting and expensive season of weddings.

If there’s a prototypical event for people my age, it’s probably their friends getting divorced, although I haven’t seen much of that so far.

Life is never over.

Even though I’m pretty firmly in middle age, there are still signs of youth in my social circle.

A friend had his first child a few days ago.

I have various other friends who are still playing music in public on a regular basis and recording albums.

My older acquaintances and family members are as vibrantly alive as I am — or moreso. They travel, learn new skills and hobbies, create, meditate, dream.

It’s all beautiful. And while the emphasis shifts, each part of life has much to recommend it.

Listening to this very old song again, I hear my younger self telling a story about being adrift in the midst of life, and maybe of feeling as if I’d missed my chance (“darling you’ve let yourself go” — pretty confident I was singing to myself there).

I was probably 29 years old when I wrote those words. I’ve certainly let myself go a lot further since then.

What’s the point of it all?

If we’re all adrift in the midst of life, and nothing ever ends up being all that solid — we’re sleepwalking out and back home each day — what are we even really doing here?

The thing I’m coming to these days is that this is the point: we’re here.

We get to exist in this brief slash of light between two curtains of infinite darkness; the time before we were born and the time after we die.

We will find many purposes and causes and connections while we’re here, and they will all be valid. But the main thing is that we get to have a consciousness and a body at all; we get to be human beings who are cognizant of our own existence.

The beauty of being here is unbearable sometimes.

I feel immense gratitude when I remember the privilege I have in being here — getting to hold a friend’s four-day-old child in my arms, discussing life and death and poetry over dinner with one of my greatest teachers, walking a slobbering sheepadoodle along the railpath in the blazing sun.

We dream backwards.

It’s powerful and strange thing to realize how much time has passed. As Philip Larkin puts it in his poem “I Have Started to Say”:

I have started to say
“A quarter of a century”
Or “thirty years back”
About my own life.

It makes me breathless
It’s like falling and recovering
In huge gesturing loops
Through an empty sky.

While his image conjures the fear of having nothing underneath you, it also brings to mind the wonder of suddenly realizing you can fly.

It’s like a dream in which you fall, miss the ground, and find yourself floating high above everything.

I’m not sure I could see it so clearly until now, or enjoy it as much.

Sleepwalk Home

Sleep safe, I know you will. 
Immune to all the things that kill.
The closet's closing in I'd say 
For you who gently fascinates. 

We dream backwards.
We sleepwalk home. 
We dream backwards. 
We sleepwalk home. 

Dropped you over you know. 
But you wouldn't fall, you'd float.
You lose your mind each night. 
Your heart will never dim like light. 

We dream backwards.
We sleepwalk home. 
We dream backwards. 
We sleepwalk home.

Darling you've let yourself go. 
Darling you've let yourself go. 
I don't fall I float. 
I don't fall I float. 
I don't fall I float. 
I don't fall I float.