Today (Xmas) is my 72nd birthday. My brother’s birthday was Xmas Eve 7 years before me (and our father happened to be Jewish) so this was always something of a family joke (as in “they stopped inviting my mother to holiday parties for some reason…”) or juvenile complaints about only ever getting a single gift trying to do double duty.

But my beloved brother having died at his own hand in middle age, the Xmas Eve reminder ever since has tinged the holidays for me with a certain amount of melancholy. Merry Xmas and Good Will Towards All, and all that, but for me personally… it always seems like a good time to take stock.

My physical health is reasonably good (below the neck, anyway) but Alzheimers is reminding me that I have to get all my acts together, and do it now, while I can still (sort of) remember how they work.

I’m an old techie, and I put together all sorts of personal systems for tracking finances, writing & selling books, keeping organizations running, and so forth. I took great pride in my systems, but they’re a problem now. If I have to migrate operating systems (curse you, Microsoft!), I have to do far too much manual work finding all my bits and pieces and making them work again. Or giving up on them and retreating to more ordinary ground (and you can only retreat so far).

Remember the old-time vaudeville acts where magicians use sticks and spin plates, waiting for the crash? Yeah, like that. I hadn’t planned for the inevitable transitions that aging lifetimes bring.

Some of this I get to watch in surrogate — Barbershop Choruses tend to have a certain “senior-heavy” membership profile. Just last week, my own Quartet lost its aged baritone (more than 10 years older than me) — the latest sudden casualty of the inevitable. (He’s not in the above picture – we had a substitute.)

Now, I didn’t get into all this on today’s holiday as a bummer, but as a cautionary tale. Me, I’m a pretty tough hard case (my unfortunate brother was more fragile). But there are things I should have done when building up my tailored tech systems that would help me now, and that’s something for me to consider. And for you, too.

It’s no joy dismantling a complex Facebook/Mailing list/etc/marketing system once you’re “past maintaining it”. There may be several vendors involved and you may have a hard time putting the sequence of handoffs and responsibilities into a clear view for simplifying or maintaining it, much less acquiring clarity on all the cost elements.

Now I have to take stock about how I need to spend my remaining time in publishing. I will always want to create stories, now that I know how to. I have new long stories in my head (and partially written), though I worry I may not get them out into publication. I know I can no longer do the clever marketing I used to do, because I can’t maintain the tracking systems I used to use and have to rein in that expense accordingly. That means that the business of publishing will be suboptimal for me. But on the other hand, I still have the functioning means of publishing, and I won’t let that stop me. It’s not all about money, at this point — it’s about leaving something more behind, and I hope to do that.

We all want to leave something behind. Use this holiday to take stock of where you are on your own journey, and do what you can to accommodate the changes to come, without worrying too much about how they might change. It’s all in your own hands.

Merry Xmas!