You've Got Until You're 80 to Work It Out.

Life Lessons from a Mysterious Irishman

It was the most unexpected way for a conversation to start, but then again, conversations seek you out in Ireland. 

“Let them be impatient if that’s the lesson they’ve got to learn to learn today!”, said the man with the twinkling eyes.

Cars awkwardly navigated past us.

Why, one might ask, has he dismounted from his bike and decided to hold court with us on this snaking mounting pass?

Yet in the next few minutes, this extraordinary man, clad in bright blue neoprene and set against the mournful Irish horizon, would disseminate several life lessons. 

Today, I want to share the gospel of Damien with you.

“Everyone has a message. But the thing is that you don’t know who it’s for. That’s why you have to get out into the world and talk to as many people as possible. So you can find out who it’s for.”

Sometimes, it’s not just what someone says but how they say it that leaves a mark.

This mysterious Damien seemed immune to the rain beating down.

In fact, it didn’t matter what was going on outside, because he was propelled by a force of living energy.

Some people walk before themselves. Or rather, cast such a spell that you don’t see their flesh at all - only a vibrant, living essence.

What struck me about this “message” is that you don’t arrive at it by thinking; it’s revealed when you have the courage to live it.

It’s okay if you don’t know what it is yet.

Maybe you are not meant to!

You figure it out along the way.

And more so, you must do - because if finding out and giving this message is life’s purpose - then your life is not entirely your own anyway.

It can only be realised through both its discovery and its giving.

The rain beat down and Damien, head peering in through the window now, continued.

“Well the thing about life is, you’ve got till you’re 80 to work it out. Till you’re 80. You don’t need to have it all figured out yet. You’re doing just fine - as long as you keep looking.”

This matters.

And I hope that whoever might need to hear it hears it.

You have until you’re 80 to work it out.

This is hard to share, but I lost a friend to suicide this year. 

A brilliant, brilliant man who was so loved and yet whose demons overcame him.

Too many of us are assailed by silent, treacherous voices. And too often, these voices are given no outlet.

We keep them locked inside.

Only we know the voices particular to ourselves.

Yet so often, these voices bear a far more familiar resemblance to the struggles others face than we realise.

And yet we keep them trapped inside because we feel too damn ashamed to feel these things. We wish we were more and feel like we will be forever landlocked in our imagined inadequacies.

You get to fail in life.
You get to make mistakes.
You have a new day tomorrow to turn things around.
And it doesn’t damn well matter if you feel you've tried it so many times before.

You get to try again.

You never know how the sum of those unseen efforts can suddenly turn things around, without knowing why today is the day.

My twenties were a decade of panic attacks that turned life into a living hell—a hell where I felt separate from the world, never imagining I would eventually claw my way to a deeper sense of health as I grew older.

Yes, it took work.

But every day, that was my dream: that I might one day feel healthy.

I looked at my contemporaries building careers, lives and worldly success. But all I wanted at that time was to survive and to see if there was something else on the other side of that survival. 

Maybe one shouldn’t write of these things.

Even as I write, I feel a sense of taboo.

But Christ, maybe the message I am meant to write is to shatter the very taboo that landlocked me all those years.

And maybe that is part of the fulfilment of Damien’s message. 

Because his message found a home in me.

Not just with the courage to write this.

But because the animation of his spirit reached me.

After my twenties — doing everything I could to hide in plain sight by playing rock ‘n roll, I pursued temporal things in my thirties.

It drove me across the world: the breadth and depths of Russia, China, America, East Africa and in Europe, from the Black Sea to the Black Loch.

Your message is sometimes daemonic in tone - and you don’t know if you are running to it or from it.

Damien, I think, would say that they are connected — indivisible from one another even.

We all carry shadows.

But in meeting Demien, I felt, as Hesse wrote, that all the hundred thousand pieces of life's game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to play a better hand at the game.

When you reach into another human being and help them - that is meaning.

Damien did that for me.

We obsess too much in this modern world — with our inner butchery, compulsion to compare and pining for recognition.

But it didn’t matter a damn to me what Damien did.

Who he was, was everything.

He had dared to become.
He had risked to be.
He sensed that somewhere in our car, parked on a mountain pass in Ireland, someone needed to hear something.

Who knows where the wisdom of what you have accumulated will land?
Who it could reach.
Who it could help, raise, transform…

And what’s more:
You’ve got till you’re 80 to work it out.

You are doing much better than you think.

And there is life before you.

The first thing we forget is the miracle.
And the last thing we remember?
The miracle.

Reconnect with that today.

And then, Damien pedalled off into the distance, legs powerful as pistons, driving his bike forward through the murk.

A beacon in neoprene, lighting up the dark.

Message imparted.

You’ve got till you’re 80 to work it out.

With love,
Jim

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