50 Things at 50

"At fifty, everything I thought would hold me together had already fallen apart."

Inside eighteen months, Chuck Waters lost the three things his adult life had been built on: the drinking he had used to get through thirty years of being the provider, a relationship that had run on and off for nearly seven years, and the business he had built from nothing. Then he turned fifty.

50 Things at 50 is not a bucket-list victory lap. Waters is a massage therapist, not a guru, and he says so on the page. He is candid about a drinking habit he has not fully resolved, about a father he has forgiven but never reconciled with, and about children who are not in his life. Those threads do not close by the last page, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.

What he did next was not a plan. It was a list. Fifty things at fifty, most of which scared him. Skydiving. A first marathon. A bungee jump three hundred feet above a canyon in Cabo. Ten miles into the Okefenokee in February, camped that far from the nearest other human being, on one of the coldest nights of the year. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, he met the woman he would marry.

50 Things at 50 is the honest record of that year and the years after it: a man learning to watch his own thinking instead of believing it, to forgive what could be forgiven, to find out what he was actually for, and to stop fighting currents that were never going to yield to more effort.

For anyone who has finished the tidy version of this story elsewhere, the one where everything heals on schedule, this is the other kind. Proof that a life can fall apart without being over, written by someone still in the middle of it.

"The old story can end; the next one still gets to begin."