The Thought I Never Had at 30

Something shifts before the body does.

In 1990, lava from Kīlauea buried the town of Kalapana under seventy-five feet of rock. The road went with it. So did the beach, the coconut palms, a subdivision called Royal Gardens, and everything those people had built there. Years later, residents came back and planted new palms by hand in the hardened lava. The beach we were descending toward sat on top of all of that. Anyone who wanted to see it had to earn the privilege on foot.

From above, it looked extraordinary — a narrow strip of sand between dark lava and intensely blue water, the ocean almost impossibly clear, beautiful enough by any standard to make people talk about it afterward. The trail down was steeper in person than it had looked in the photographs.

About fifteen minutes in, I suggested that perhaps we had seen enough. My wife disagreed.

This was not unusual. Kayoko possesses a level of curiosity that has repeatedly improved my life. She is willing to walk farther, look longer, and investigate things I am prepared to dismiss. Many of my favorite travel memories exist because she ignored my initial assessment of a situation and kept going. I pointed out what seemed obvious — the beach was still a considerable distance away, the footing was uneven, the Hawaiian sun was becoming steadily less forgiving, and every step downward would eventually need to be retraced. She listened patiently and continued walking.

Looking back, what strikes me is not that she persuaded me to keep going. It is that I needed to be persuaded at all.

At thirty, I would have charged down the trail without a second thought. The destination would have occupied my entire attention. The climb back belonged to the future and therefore required no consideration in the present. If the return trip proved difficult, that would be a problem for the future version of me. Somewhere between then and sixty-three, I had developed a different habit.

As we continued down, I found myself repeatedly looking back up the slope — not anxiously, not dramatically, but simply taking inventory of the distance, the incline, the footing, and the effort the climb would likely require several hours later. The behavior itself surprised me. I was not worried about reaching the beach or making it back. The hike was well within my capabilities. Yet part of my attention remained fixed on the return trip, and at some point, perhaps halfway down, I realized what was happening.

I had begun carrying tomorrow into today.

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The phrase sounds larger than the moment itself. In reality, it was nothing more than a man hiking toward a beach while thinking about the climb home. Yet the observation lingered because I recognized the same pattern elsewhere in my life. The activities themselves had not changed very much. What had changed was my awareness that they were connected — that a workout carries its cost forward, that a late night negotiates with the morning that follows. I had begun noticing the other end of things.

Aging is usually described as a gradual loss of ability. Some of that is accurate — strength changes, recovery changes — but I think one of the earliest changes is subtler. You begin noticing the return trip.

The younger version of me was remarkably good at spending capacity. Sleep would restore it. Recovery would restore it. Time itself seemed willing to restore almost anything, and physical effort felt less like a resource and more like a birthright. The older version of me still enjoys difficult things — I still train, still walk, still travel, still take on projects that require sustained time and energy. The difference is that I now find myself thinking about consequences that once seemed too distant to matter. Oddly enough, I do not experience this as a decline.

Standing on that volcanic trail, watching my wife continue downward while I mentally calculated the climb back, I realized that the change felt less like weakness than awareness. The trail had not become steeper. The beach had not become farther away. What had changed was my understanding that every descent eventually becomes an ascent.

The beach, as it turned out, was worth every step. We spent hours there. The water was magnificent, the lava cliffs surrounding the shoreline made the entire place feel hidden from the rest of the world, and by the time we started back, the afternoon sun was high enough to confirm every concern I had entertained on the way down. The climb was exactly as difficult as expected. Kayoko handled it with characteristic enthusiasm. I handled it more slowly. Both approaches proved effective.

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What stayed with me afterward was not the exertion, nor even the beach itself, but the realization that I had spent part of the descent thinking about the ascent. That was a thought I never had at thirty. At thirty, I thought almost exclusively about destinations. At sixty-three, I find myself paying closer attention to the entire journey — the destination, the path, and the return. Experience has a way of teaching that these things are connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.

The lava that created the beach we walked on also buried the town, the subdivision, and the road that once led to the old shoreline. People came back anyway and planted palms in the rock. The route changed entirely. Something worth walking to grew up in its place.

Looking back, I suspect aging often works the same way.