A Comfortable Lie

 

I don’t tell myself I will live forever, nor do I tell myself I won’t. Instead, I choose to live a comfortable lie. I am perfectly content with convincing myself that my timeline has no boundary, a strange but entirely necessary deception.

Since retiring, my relationship with time has dissolved entirely. The structure of alarms, calendars, and professional deadlines has evaporated, leaving behind a vast, seamless expanse. I rarely know what day it is and sometimes lose track of the month.

If I were to count the days, it would feel like watching a countdown clock tick toward the zero-mark at the end of a stadium game. And don't we all want the game to go on forever? To maintain the illusion that the whistle will never blow, I wrap myself tightly in this comfortable lie.

Yet, through my seventy-plus years, I have seen ample, undeniable proof of reality. I have stood at the resting places of grandparents, parents, cousins, and friends. I watched them age, fade, and eventually vanish.

But looking back, I realize that every single one of them, at some point or another, bought into this same fiction. They made plans for next year, spoke of the distant future, and lived as though their days were an infinite resource, safely sheltered by their own comfortable lie.

It is an easy thing to accept, and deeply desired. It is a biological survival mechanism, a necessary shield against the heavy truth of our mortality. We do not just crave the deception itself; we crave the ability to crawl inside its soft, familiar edges, to cuddle inside its warmth, and to accept it as absolute truth. We live by pretending the end isn't coming, nestled safely inside our most comfortable lie. Is it actually a lie, or just my reality?