Teetotally tuned: The painful pleasure of moderation

The moderate life can mean the end of rebellion. And yet in middle age it can be a comfort.

- Rohit Brijnath

My friend with beautiful, smiling eyes is having injections in them. A sheet with a hole is tugged over her face, her eye is clamped, a needle slid into the inner corner. It hurts just to write this. Imagine her.

She is 55, curly-haired, spontaneous, has never met a type of alcohol she doesn't like and recently discovered she has a serious eye condition. And so now, even before her doctor could counsel caution, she's embraced that most hideous of words which is familiar to people in their 50s and 60s.

Moderation.

I'm drinking less, she says, shrugging it off with a grin. Middle age is about somehow laughing at life's assaults yet there was something poignant underlying her statement. Her restraint, after all, is the offspring of vulnerability. Invincibility, that cloak lent to us for a brilliant while in our youth, has been taken away. Now she has to protect herself.

I'm more crotchety than usual these days. It's not just the sub-human bigots on social media, the ingrates who don't say "thank you" when you hold the lift for them and the oblivious phone talker-walkers, but this prudence which arrives in middle age.

I find I'm becoming a virtuous mathematician, who measures steps and sleep, and counts carbs and calories. I'm squinting at labels in supermarkets to check sodium levels and trying to hurry through the chips aisle with my head down. Robert Frost wrote so elegantly about The Road Not Taken and perhaps one interpretation was to not regret the path you choose. I am, contentedly, a boring middle-path walker now.