I had been lying alone in bed, awake in the dark, but was drifting back to sleep. I had no idea what time it was. Suddenly I heard a female voice ask, “What are you doing?” It startled me, and then two seconds later, my watch alarm went off.
One reason I think it might be God who was speaking, and not just my dreamlike hallucinatory condition, is that the voice was female; and I consider it likely that God could very well be a woman, kind of like Alanis Morissette in the movie ‘Dogma’. At first, I was intrigued by the fact that the voice decided to speak to me just before the alarm went off, as if there were some incredible clock inside my subconscious that knew to the second when my watch would start beeping. Then, I considered what the voice was asking me.
“What are you doing?” What could that mean? It was almost deliberately ambiguous. It could have been asking me why I was sleeping. Then again, this was my fortieth birthday, a milestone in my life, and the question could have been translated to, “What are you doing with your life?”
Well, what am I doing with my life? You might think that I was wasting no time beginning my mid-life crisis, but in fact I had begun to fret over getting older several years ago. I think it was on my 36th birthday, when I realized that I had transitioned from one age group to another, namely from “thirty-five and under” into “thirty-six to death”. Perhaps it was the cherry angiomas, benign red skin bumps, that had started to develop on my skin. Oh jeez, I thought, my mother has those! I’m getting old like her! In a state of panic, I rushed right out to my neighborhood health food store; as a result, for the last several years, I have been taking every anti-oxident vitamin and herbal preparation known to man, not to mention melatonin at night. I was going to fight getting older with every resource at my disposal.
“What are you doing?” I thought about those words as I rode my bike to work. Fighting aging is all well and good, I thought, but I was sure that really what mattered was what noteworthy things I accomplished with the time I had. As of my fortieth birthday, I had managed NOT to cure a major disease, write the Great American Novel, raise a child to adulthood, or invent a labor saving device. I was feeling like I had left no legacy that mattered; in fact, it seemed like I had taken more from the world in the form of non-renewable resources than I had given to it. For the last few days, I had been thinking about my fortieth birthday as the time to start working on that novel. Some people make New Year’s resolutions; I make round number birthday resolutions. I wondered what I would resolve to do on my fiftieth birthday.
Twice on my way to work, a fellow bicyclist interrupted my thoughts to say something to me. “Do you ride all the way to downtown?” said one. Excuse me, I wanted to say to him through gritted teeth, but I’m having a Philosophical Moment. But I answered him anyway, and we briefly chatted as we rode through Golden Gate Park. Then, later, another bicyclist said how lucky we’ve been to have some nice sunny weather lately. I agreed with him, but really just wanted to be left alone with my thoughts. Bicyclists often say something to one another—there is a feeling of comradeship, and perhaps of being part of a minority group who do something special and invigorating that they believe in. Yet I wasn’t in the mood to talk. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts.
“What are you doing?” The voice haunted me as I rode into the office. I am forty, I thought, as I rush to catch the cramped, rickety elevator, whose doors were about to close. “Aaaahhh,” I yelled out, and the man inside held the door open for me. I was too self-absorbed to thank him; however, I did manage to inconvenience him by cramming my bike into the elevator so that there was barely room for us. He held the door open for me when got to our floor; this time, I did thank him.
There was a message on my voicemail. It was Cindi, who sang “Happy Birthday” to me. I was starting to feel better. She called two more times in the morning to wish me happy birthday again, each in a slightly different way (“felicitations on the day of the anniversary your birth”). Oh, those little things that people can do. They make a difference, don’t they?
Maybe I do contribute to the world in ways I don’t know or realize, I tell myself. Maybe the little things we do matter as much as the big ones. Somehow it isn’t very comforting, stumbling through life knowing that I make a difference but not always knowing how or why. If there is a God, and if she speaks to us, it occurs to me, she does so in the form of open-ended questions, rather than handing us the answers. Whatever the source, I just got one of those open-ended questions this morning. I guess I just have to figure out the rest.