The other night, I was driving home after three straight days of very little sleep and juggling the chaos from the Godzilla of all work weeks. As I turned on the road leading to my street, the oddest feeling came over me. The road suddenly did not feel like the correct road. I found myself wondering where the heck I was and where I was going. If it’s my house I’m headed to, I thought, this is definitely not the right way.

Maybe it had something to do with the constant scramble of work, the struggle to recall which matters needed attending most urgently. It could be that a part of my mind was unaccepting of the fact that I was finally headed home after what felt like a month’s worth of activity crammed into fourteen hours. Either way, the feeling was very strange and one I can’t recall experiencing before.

I suppose I should be concerned. Maybe this is how dementia starts. It isn’t walking into a room and wondering why you came there––that happens to all of us all the time––it’s about knowing why you’re going where you’re going, but you can’t remember how to get there.

No matter how good you are at a thing, there is always someone better. And even if there isn’t someone better, just wait; the better person will come along eventually. A secret to happiness is discovering it doesn’t matter. If you’re lucky, you won’t have to become the best before you realize this fact. Jerry West spent most of his basketball career in pursuit of a championship, and when he finally got one, he felt empty. He was the greatest player of his time, and it took winning a trophy to realize it never really mattered.

“The key to Life is to die before you die.”

So I am unconcerned about these potential signs of early dementia. We see a confused older person, and we pity them, but we ought to pity ourselves as well, because we are all so confused all the time. The most lucid people may be the most confused of all, for who among us does not spend the bulk of their waking hours in a fantasy world of their own making, convinced that the abstractions we donate our time to––our homes, our careers, our nationalities, our possessions, our religions––are nothing but an illusion we’ve convinced ourselves is real.

Real Life is not composed of thoughts or systems, any more than music written on a page is actual music. Life is the way the music moves you as you listen. So long as you do listen.