Some Days, I Leave the Courtroom

At 77, I no longer need anyone to remind me how quickly life passes. Getting out of a chair provides enough information.

Most of my life is behind me. I know this without knowing how much lies ahead. The arithmetic has become difficult to ignore, even for someone who has spent much of his life ignoring arithmetic.

I look back at the work, the relationships, the mistakes, the departures, the decisions I made with complete confidence and later struggled to explain. Some people I loved are gone. Others are alive, living lives that no longer include me. My body demands more attention than I ever wanted to give it.

And I find myself asking a question I used to be too busy to consider: How much of my life did I spend living, and how much did I spend waiting to feel satisfied?

I am drawn to Buddhism partly because paying attention seems like useful work. I have no interest in pretending to be serene. I remain capable of irritation, vanity, impatience, and a detailed explanation of why someone else is wrong.

But I am beginning to recognize how much energy I spend on habits that leave me miserable. The most expensive one is the courtroom I keep in my head.

For years, I wanted other people to confirm my worth. A response. An invitation. Recognition for work I believed deserved more attention. I wanted people to remember me, understand me, appreciate me.

I still enjoy appreciation. A reader telling me something I wrote meant something to them matters to me. So does hearing from an old friend.

The trouble begins when the absence of a response determines the value of my day.

An unanswered message becomes evidence. Then comes the trial. I produce exhibits, recall previous offenses, and deliver a verdict without hearing from the defendant. An impressive amount of labor over a telephone that has failed to ring.

I need people. I have no ambition to become emotionally self-sufficient. But I want fewer hours spent demanding affection from someone unwilling or unable to offer it, and more with the people who make room for me.

Some of the people I miss are still alive. That is its own kind of missing. I expect to keep feeling it. I also have people to love today.

I have carried some arguments longer than I have owned furniture. I remember what someone said, what I should have said, and the devastating reply that arrived twenty years too late.

The original encounter lasted minutes. My revisions have taken decades.

Some injuries were serious. I do not owe everyone forgiveness, and I do not need to welcome everyone back. Distance has its uses. So does admitting how badly something hurt.

But replaying an injury has never repaired one. I have tried often enough to consider the experiment complete.

The harder trial is the one where I am the defendant.

After we moved to Guanajuato, we lived in a house at the top of a steep hill. I had a dog named Natto, a miniature schnauzer. He loved to jump onto my bed and roll onto his back so I would rub his stomach. Walking him three times a day, up and down that hill, exhausted me. When we went out, we left him inside, where he sometimes made a mess. One day I examined the fence around our rooftop terrace and decided he would be safe there while we were gone.

When we returned, Natto was dead in the street. Somehow he had jumped the fence. I had checked it. I had been sure.

He paid for my mistake with his life. He trusted me to keep him safe, and I chose what was easier for me. I think of him every day. The guilt has not faded, and I no longer expect it to.

I have no exhibits for my side of that one. I cannot apologize to Natto. I can only live with what I did and take more care with the lives that depend on me.

I dislike how little any of this resembles a grand spiritual breakthrough. Usually, progress means catching myself halfway through a familiar grievance and deciding to make lunch.

I still want to make good work. I want readers. I want my films to reach an audience. After a lifetime of writing and filmmaking, I have started learning new ways to make films. Being a beginner at 77 involves enthusiasm and confusion in roughly equal measure.

What interests me less is the endless comparison. Someone always has a larger audience, a better deal, more recognition. I have spent enough years around accomplished people to know success does not cure insecurity. Would a larger audience make me enjoy the hours spent making a film? Or would I immediately want a larger one still?

The first time I heard John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, after taking psilocybin mushrooms, I stopped analyzing the music and felt myself become part of it. His saxophone sounded like prayer. When the record ended, I sat motionless. The familiar world had changed. I did not check how many other people were listening. I was not thinking about an audience at all.

That is the condition I keep trying to return to.

These days, in Guanajuato, I want time to work, time with the woman I love, music, conversation, and enough quiet to hear myself think. Sometimes that is as simple as hearing my partner laughing in the next room. I want to finish projects I care about. I want to enjoy a day before deciding whether it was productive.

I think about death.

I would be lying if I claimed acceptance. I want more time. I have unfinished work. There are mornings when the prospect of leaving all this feels intolerable. I have no firsthand knowledge of what follows, and my spiritual interests do not exempt me from uncertainty.

What has changed is my willingness to look. Thinking about my own ending helps me make decisions I have postponed. Call someone. Begin the film. Stop spending the afternoon on an argument that has already consumed enough afternoons. At 77, I no longer wait for a more convenient time.

I have lived. I have loved people, made films, written plays and books, taken chances. I still lose my temper. I still check how many people read something I wrote or how many views a video received. I still catch myself convening the court, calling the old witnesses, rehearsing the old complaint.

But I notice sooner. Some days, I actually leave the courtroom.

This morning, I have work I want to do and someone I want to spend time with. My body will have opinions about the schedule. I will make adjustments.

I want to see how the film turns out.

Next Tuesday: When Powerful Men Dislike the Movie

What happens when a movie tells the truth about someone powerful enough to make it disappear? From William Randolph Hearst’s campaign against Citizen Kane to the pressure surrounding Alex Gibney’s documentary about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s attacks on broadcasters, I look at how money, threats, and fear can determine what we get to see—and what never reaches us.