Rebecca Solnit, in her brilliantly beautiful book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, muses around “the blue of distance”—the way the shorter wavelengths of blue light scatter on the edges of the horizon, in water, in the sky, giving whatever is far away a dreamy and melancholic blue haze. She recalls gazing back from Mt Tamalpais at San Francisco cloaked in blue, longing for this “city in a dream”, fully recognizing that she had just come from there, and the “brown coffee, yellow eggs, and green traffic lights filled me with no such desire.”

“For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains…Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.”

At 20, our own lives are crouching in the romantic blue shadows of distance, calling us to saddle our longings and race toward them. We see outlines, mostly created from what we think we know and what we have been told, and we squint to make the unfocused shadows of the distance into what we imagine them to be.

At 30, we’re running. Our feet are light, our packs getting heavier with commitments, challenges, goals, and responsibilities. We’re strong. We’re on the path. We find markers along the way that smack of the expected and encourage us along. We ignore everything that doesn’t quite make sense because we know we’re still on the way. Our feet might start bleeding, but we suck it up. We know where we are going.

At 40, we pause and look up. Somehow, the hazy blue mountain is the same distance away as when we started. Our feet are bloody and our shoes worn through. And now, with the added perspective of experience, we aren’t sure if the mountain in the distance we’ve been running toward is actually a mountain at all. Or a sleeping bear. Or a pile of garbage. Or a giant tangerine. We start to suspect we’ve been misled.

So we dump our pack out onto the ground and see what we’ve got left. We peel off the socks that are stuck to our raw skin. We get a little angry. We can’t go back. Everything behind us is gone. But we can’t keep going forward in the same way because we have to acknowledge that we were chasing something unreal and probably foolish. So we buy a sports car or get a new hair color. And we wait.

If we’re lucky, after some fresh air and a snack, we start to giggle. We come alive with love, like a parent delighting in a curious child. We stare down at the blood and dirt and busted shoes, the empty candy bar wrappers and earnestly notated maps that got us here. And we see it for what it is—a valiant journey to nowhere—embarked upon with such heart and strength and love and ambition that all we can do is feel admiration for ourselves for being the heroes of such a pointless, bloody, and heartfelt battle.

And this is the beginning.

At 50 we begin.

We begin life again with the open heart of one who knows what a fool he is, has been, and will always be, and recognizes with camaraderie and compassion this journey in the faces he meets. We begin to respect the inherent pain and suffering that starts the day we become human. And we decide to enjoy it all.

I am not a virgin. I am covered in scars, inside and out. And I have said yes to every way of living and every experience I could bear to. None of it has been wasted. I am a disturbing, beautiful scrapbook of what it is to say yes.

I know the mountain not only isn’t blue, but probably isn’t even a mountain. I know how to either enjoy the romantic longing of the unreachable, unfathomable distance, or fling myself out the door in pursuit, solely for the joy of having legs that run—knowing full well I’m going nowhere.

The humility of the young man in the arena is the humility of a budding hero. The humility of the older man in the arena is that of the fool. His face may be marred with dust and sweat and blood, but he’s also shit his pants a couple of times and taken a full-strength charge at what turned out to be an old Pepsi machine while everyone watched.

The fool is the uncarved block, with purity earned and chosen, burned clean through the fire of living. With all the wisdom of the journey, the fool returns to the beginning, and if he’s lucky, gets to write the next story from the honest humility of simplicity, patience, and compassion.

“Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures. Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.” — Lao Tzu