The Deflating Balloon

There isn’t much to this, but recently I have been conceding to myself the phenomenon known as the Deflating Balloon – or more commonly known as, the law of diminishing returns.

I don’t know what has sparked this disinterest. It’s not a generalized apathy, but perhaps a more targeted one. Things that were once goals have been checked off. I guess I’ve been there and done that? That seems odd to say, and maybe it has to do with growing older, and maybe it happens to everyone? The priorities in our 20s are not, never, the same in our 50s.

I don’t look at it as a middle-aged crisis kind of thing. That is a different situation in a different context. It is more like the feeling of a post party lull. Life is like party planning – you sweat over the details, try to check off everything you might need, and what it’ll take for it to become a reality. It’s like life’s great crescendo – a build up to the point of the event, the accomplishment, itself. Naturally life throws curve balls and you have to mitigate them the best way possible to avoid unnecessary problems that might arise. It’s all part of the stress of event planning. You’ll get there, eventually, but the day seems so distant in the future it almost seems un-doable. It’s not of course. Time continues to flow, and as the To Do list dwindles in length eventually the day arrives. Like a flash it’s over, and the event itself is another checked off the list.

So what’s next? Well the post event is usually consumed with sitting down to relax tired feet, perhaps a beverage, and looking around at the decorations and slowly deflating balloons.

This is where I’m at from a personal perspective. It is not a depression – don’t misunderstand that. While I hesitate to discuss personal items I confess the previous few years have been a flurry of activities, a personal crescendo of sorts, and now I feel I’m in this seemingly awkward position of sitting back in a wooden chair at some union hall looking at the sagging decorations and drooping balloons. The natural question is to think about what’s next? – but there lacks an energy to stand up from the wooden chair. Furthermore, the emphasis on certain things has shifted with age, and I assume it’s a moment of reckoning on them. Just because we’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean that way needs to continue. Things change. Things also come full circle.

I mentioned life is like party planning. It’s also a journey (no matter how cliche that sounds). Eventually, however, you start at the beginning again. It’s not the same beginning of course, but a new beginning nonetheless. Like walking to the horizon only to find another horizon in the distance, and between us all new terrain with its own challenges. The choice is to continue onward or sit on the wooden chair wondering, contemplating, the expanse between. There is also a natural pull of gravity from both horizons – behind and forward or, if you prefer, past and present. A new car is fantastic, but oftentimes we miss the old one. It’s why automobile enthusiasts restore vintage models. There’s something familiar about it all. The seats. The steering wheel. The little deficiencies that absorb the driver into an almost simpler period from which it was from. Technology is great. Self-driving cars are a marvel of engineering innovation and have their place, but there’s something about (for example) a 1949 Buick Roadmaster.

Sometimes we’re a paradox. We look to the future, but yearn for the past. Stadiums are constructed to have all modern amenities, but architects work tirelessly on the visual aesthetics to provide a vintage vibe of days gone by. Orioles Park at Camden Yards is the poster for this, but that is a more of a generalized view from what I’m saying as compared to an individual. For myself I’m looking at things from a different vantage point than I have previously. Things that I needed (or thought I needed) have slowly been recalculated in recent memory. In one way I’m kind of free from constraints that hindered choices. Without them I feel almost in a bit of a quandary without a focused sense of purpose that I had placed on me. It’s admittedly confusing as I look at all these deflating balloons. Perhaps it’s a reassessment? There are things I will never do, no matter how trivial, because I quite simply can’t. Too many moving parts outside of my control for it to become reality, and I have to accept that.

“Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.” – Steven Wright