Montaigne. I’m 59. Still curious. Still learning.

Michel de Montaigne died at 59.

I am 59 now.

Naturally, I took this personally. One minute you are drinking tea, feeling reasonably eternal. The next, a Renaissance gentleman has ruined your morning.

Montaigne spent his life asking himself what it means to live well. I do, too. Different centuries. Same confusion.

He wrote his essays to make sense of his own thoughts.
I write these posts for the same reason.

During my cancer treatment, I felt that clarity Montaigne wrote about. When you’re fighting for your life, everything unnecessary falls away in seconds. There’s no room for pretending.

I knew exactly what mattered: my boys, my breath, the next morning.

And when my body healed, the old illusions slowly drifted back... Humans are funny that way. We survive something enormous and still worry about emails.

Maybe the more we accept endings, the more space we have for beginnings. The less we pretend.

So what did Montaigne teach me?

Pay attention. Laugh at yourself before life has to do it for you. Stop pretending you are above ordinary human nonsense. You are not. None of us are.

Montaigne wrote about fear, vanity, friendship, illness, appetite, habits, and all the small ridiculous things that make us human. He studied it. That is what I like about him. He makes curiosity feel less like a hobby and more like a way of staying alive.

These days, I am less interested in ambition and more drawn to simplicity: early mornings, a walk, a sentence that makes me stop and smile, a friend who listens instead of fixing.

I don’t want to conquer the world. I want to notice more of it. A morning. A sentence. A ridiculous fear. A friend who listens instead of fixing.

And perhaps this is why I like this photo. Not because it is wise. Because it is not.

So maybe the real question at 59 is not: Who should I become next?

Maybe it is: What have I overlooked in who I already am?

I am 59. Still curious. Still learning. Still here. And, on better days, still laughing.

Montaigne. I’m 59. Still curious. Still learning.

Montaigne. I’m 59. Still curious. Still learning.

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