I spy

or reflections on 17,885 Days, and counting

I am not a spy. That is, of course, what you’d expect a spy to say.

I have had encounters with the secret police in Jordan. And had my hotel room tossed in rural Ukraine during the elections after the Maidan revolution. But those kinds of things just sound dramatic. Real spies would never tell.

I have a group of friends who are convinced I work for a spy agency. They try and square the fuzzy job description, the frequent and sometimes last-minute travel (overlooking the fact that I don’t have an awesome accent or svelte physique), and often say as we leave our monthly coffee meetups “…have fun with your CIA stuff”.

When I start to protest that our spy agency is called CSIS in Canada, they take it as a tacit admission. So, why argue? Rock; hard place.

The closest I’ve come to the real thing is to doing an impromptu background reference check for a university buddy (with a white-haired, slightly portly man wearing a grey suit straight out of central casting, who showed up unannounced in the middle of a humid Summer in Wolfville in the 1990s).

Why am I even thinking about spies? Sure, I love the show Slow Horses and have read most of Le Carre’s stuff and read or watched plenty of other spy or spy-adjacent books and shows.

But time. Time is making me think of it. Time and our societal culture of “so, what do you do,” being the first question generally asked when we network.

This week I sat down at a lunch table during Canada’s wonk nerd fest, and was waiting for a friend or two to join me. While I waited for them, I introduced myself to an older gentleman – and that was question one after the names.

Turns out we’d both worked for the same government, at the same time, and likely sat in the Cabinet or Cabinet committee room together unbeknownst to either one of us. It was a lovely chat.

But he still started with ‘what do you do for a living?’ – and I replied with my most recent standard response about being a father who tries to chase his 3 young adult children around to their sports and other activities these days.

Because – as James Carville says – if you’re explaining, you’re losing. And when someone asks what do you do in polite conversation, they’re either looking for a way in, or a way out; and usually not after a soliloquy-length explanation instead of a simple job title that they can attach themselves and that stay-or-go-in-this-conversation decision to.

Our boys are aging-out of their schooling days, some quicker than others.

Our youngest will be in Grade 12 this fall. Middle guy is going into third year of his undergrad. And our oldest son graduates from his undergrad tomorrow.

I turn 49 today. That means I’ve lived something like 17,885 days. That seems like a lot, when you calculate it out like that.

I can’t say that I’ve lived every one of those to its fullest. I’m honestly not even sure how I’d make an assessment of that, or whether that’s what we’re supposed to even do. I think Buddhists would have something to say about that kind of enthusiastic boosterism for non-stop Carpe Diem.

I heard from an older man that I work closely with that the “average Canadian male lives to the age of 78.5” when we were discussing how long I could convince him to keep his job leading a company whose board I serve on.

For some reason that number has kind of stuck in my head for the past few months since we were in the thick of contract negotiations.

Because if I take that to be true, that infers I could hope for another 10,950 or so days in which to live this life; that is if I am average, which I decidedly-am.

Although I’m a bit of a wonk, so I looked it up and his stats are out-of-date. It’s actually ~80.5 years for a Canadian male, so that bumps the days-to-come to hopefully around 11,500.

There is the small matter of whether I choose to swap-out my Canadian passport for my Irish one here, which would add another .5 year to the expectancy, so let’s call it about 11,750 to be optimistic.

That’s a lot. A lot of days.

But a lot less than the nearly 18,000 sunsets and sunrises that I’ve experienced.

I was thinking about mortality the week before last while standing in a beautiful little Cementeri in the mountainside village of Fornalutx, in the Tramuntana mountain range of the Spanish island of Mallorca.

My three boys and I had gone on a little Cami (trail) walk up the mountainside and back down through the villages and back lanes of this peaceful and beautiful area. As I walked along with my youngest (and tallest) son, the other two were lagging behind a little and in conversation. We looked up and saw the cemetery gates, so I told him we should go in.

It was like a stone-walled building with no roof, open to the sky and mountains. It might have been about the most peaceful and scenic place one could be laid to rest in the ‘company’ of other souls.

We looked around a little at the family names and some of the dates people were laid to rest there. Feeling like our curiosity might be bordering on touristic voyeurism, we began to make our way out. Just as I was opening the gate, a photo on a headstone caught my eye. The man looked about my age, and the photo seemed recent. I went closer and saw that he died in 2025 and was born the year before I was. As many days as I’ve had now was all he’d gotten.

I’m not going to contrive that my life flashed before my eyes at that moment.

It did make me think about the value(s) we place on time.

A few months earlier I’d been visiting my brother in Luxembourg. I stopped by the ornate and formal American cemetery where thousands of young men were laid to rest. I went up to the road to the German cemetery, the first one built outside of Germany after the war. They were a study in contrasts – the American Cemetery guarded, well-landscaped and full of interpretive signage and monuments. The German cemetery kept by a group of volunteers, funded by donations, and tucked away behind some woods. I offer no comment on the merits of either form of remembrance or ‘honour’ afforded the dead.

I was mostly entranced by the date ranges on the headstones, young men between the ages of my youngest and oldest.

~6,500-8,000 days.

I’ve made probably – I don’t know, a million? - tiny decisions in my life so far. I’ve definitely made a huge number of mistakes. Some good choices. And been swept along on wave upon wave of good fortune and good luck.

We’re in the midst of a newly-thickening household again. I abhor the term empty nest, it implies to me bereftness. And maybe even just as a talisman, I’m determined not to give in to that kind of implied emptiness.

I prefer to think that our household and lives and going through a thinning, or a thickening – maybe even both at the same time.

Our household thinned for the better part of 8 months a year over the last four years as our oldest and middle sons went off to study at university. Both are back now, and probably well into 2027, maybe until around the time their younger brother graduates high school and goes off to university himself.

It could be that all three are heading back out of the house then and the resulting thinness becomes too much for me.

I’m almost sure it will, actually.

I could be playing Green Day’s song “Wake me up, when September ends” on repeat.

I want them to go do their undergrad, post-graduate studies, find a job they love, or travel the world. I absolutely want those things for them.

I’m also pretty sure that I’ll struggle as much with my identity in that moment as I have my whole life, just in a different way.

Who am I without them to shuttle around, read good night stories to play street ball with, remind to ‘pick up your laundry!’, watch them play sports?

I guess the truth is I still don’t really know; I guess I’ll find out. I increasingly have a good grip on who, or maybe what, I’m not (see above: not a spy, for example).

A friend of mine turns 50 this year, a milestone I get to wait another 365 days for, and he has a few good questions for himself that he shared with me:

Of the things in your life that aren’t easy, and don’t bring you joy, are you sure you should be doing them?

And,

Is it ok to be far more selfish about doing cool stuff you enjoy and are stimulated by almost exclusively? Outside of the stuff in our lives – our share of life and household, etc)?

These aren’t the only important questions, but they are good ones – and I come back to them as I navigate things since he shared them with me in January. Even when you ask – and answer – them, it’s not like a linear step to just reshaping your life or commitments. But it helps to be thoughtful about them. And shaping the architecture of your life.

Something that brings me joy, even if it isn’t always easy, is writing. I finished the first full draft of the book project manuscript last month. It’s a lot different than what I thought it would be, and for the moment it needs a lot of revision and slimming-down (I’m wordy, doncha know!).

But before I’m 50 I’ll have it submitted to agents and publishers; which will be something I’m not sure I’d have imagined at day 10,000 or even day 15,000. I’m not sure if anyone will pick it up, in fact I’m convinced the crowded-marketplace of ‘content’ these days makes that unlikely – so it may never see the light of day as a published work – but I’ve become very ok with that.

I was introduced to the idea of “writing for the drawer” about 6 or 7 months ago, and I can get my head around that concept – I’ve learned a lot about myself and the world in the process of writing 150,000+ words.

And like a lot of men, I have a lot of work to do on my male friendships – that will be one of the antidotes to the identity shifts I’ll undergo when the household thins back out again in 2027.

I binge-listened to Andrew McCarthy’s book, Who Needs Friends (An Unscientific examination of male friendship in America), last month and have probably single-handedly been responsible for a small fortune in book royalties to him after sending it to friends and recommending it to other men who’ve sent it to groups of their friends.

Earlier this week I walked into a hotel conference room in Toronto – that same one where I met the older gentleman at lunch later in the day.

Across the room I spied (there’s that word again!) a friend to whom I’d mailed the McCarthy book two weeks earlier. I had no idea he was going to be at the conference. I went over to say hello, trying not to interrupt his conversation. When he spotted me he pointed and he radiated a kind of gratitude as he related to the person he’d been speaking with that a book from me shows up on his doorstep once a year or so, and this one had arrived two days earlier.

The other fella asked what the book was and I told him about it and the premise. He cocked his head and said “I have a group of about six guys that are long-time friends. We don’t see each other that often, I’m going to send them the book.”

Later in the day after he spoke on a panel, I sent him the link for the book: “Beat you to it,” he replied, “I sent it to all six of them right after you told me about it.”

So, if I’ve got 100, 4,000, 11,000, or – kryogenics and all that be damned, or an AI meltdown – even more days to navigate, explore and see what I spy on this earth…then moments like that one, moments like blowing out the candles today, moments like replying ‘nope, not 50, yet’ (not that I intend to make that a crisis moment) to my relatives, and like standing in a beautiful cemetery in Mallorca and contemplating life; I’ll take as many of those as I can get.

They will be paired with the stuff of life moments, and the ordinary, and the ones you feel you don’t get quite right (or worse), wish you had back, or just know you have to get through and ride the waves of grief during and after.

Because that’s life.

And I know I’ll need those good moments to get me through the thin times. Good thing our house and life is thickening back-up for the next 12-18 months - so I can store them up and squirrel them away.