Orpheus in Baghdad

Everyone remembers the story as a love story.

A man loses the woman he loves, walks into the underworld, convinces death itself to return her, and is given one condition: do not look back.

Then he looks back.

The end.

It's a neat story. The kind that fits comfortably inside motivational posts and relationship advice. Trust the process. Have faith. Don't sabotage good things.

But the older I get, the less interested I become in Eurydice.

The part that stays with me now is the journey itself. The walk. The climb. The act of leaving.

Because everyone talks about what Orpheus lost. Nobody talks much about what he left behind.

What makes Orpheus interesting is that he wasn't a warrior. He wasn't Hercules. He wasn't Achilles. He didn't fight his way into the underworld or conquer it through strength. He didn't defeat death in battle.

Instead, he persuaded.

He negotiated.

He convinced.

He entered a place no human was supposed to enter armed with nothing except the belief that things did not have to remain as they were.

I've always found that detail more interesting than the tragedy itself. Not the loss. Not the failure. The decision to descend in the first place. The belief that the darkness wasn't permanent.

I turned twenty-eight recently.

And to my surprise, twenty-eight feels peaceful.

Not because life has become easier. It hasn't.

Not because I've figured everything out. I haven't.

The peace comes from somewhere else.

For most of my twenties, life felt crowded. There was always something demanding attention. A deadline. A responsibility. A crisis. A decision that couldn't wait until tomorrow.

I spent years believing that eventually I would reach some invisible checkpoint where everything would settle down. A place where the problems would finally stop arriving faster than I could solve them.

Instead, every solved problem was replaced by another.

The Greeks had the decency to place the underworld underground.

Mine usually arrived through Microsoft Teams.

A notification.

A missed call.

A message that began with a greeting and ended with a request.

There is a certain satisfaction that comes from being the person people rely on. The dependable one. The useful one. The one who somehow figures things out when everyone else is stuck.

For a long time, I mistook that feeling for purpose.

Maybe a lot of us do.

But there is a difference between having a purpose and becoming a utility.

A purpose is something you choose.

A utility is something everyone else uses.

That distinction took me years to understand.

At some point, I stopped asking whether the burdens I carried actually belonged to me. I carried them simply because I could. Work. Expectations. Other people's emergencies. Other people's disappointments. Other people's futures.

The arrangement worked until I finally asked a question I had somehow avoided for years.

What if I don't want to carry this?

Not because I'm incapable.

Simply because it isn't mine.

The older I get, the more I realize adulthood isn't learning how to carry everything. It's learning how to decide what deserves carrying.

Everything else is just gravity.

Part of growing older is also realizing how little of life is actually systematic.

When we're younger, we imagine the world operates according to hidden rules. Work hard and you'll be rewarded. Be loyal and people will stay. Be kind and kindness will return.

We treat life like an equation.

As though the right inputs naturally produce the right outputs.

The older I get, the less convinced I am that life works that way.

People are often self-interested. Sometimes cruel, though rarely in interesting ways. Most are simply trying to satisfy their own needs, solve their own problems, and survive their own private struggles.

Friendships drift.

Priorities change.

People leave jobs, cities, relationships, and entire versions of themselves behind.

Not always because they are bad people.

Often because they are human.

There is a randomness to life that becomes impossible to ignore once you've lived long enough. Outcomes aren't always earned. Loyalty isn't always rewarded. Effort doesn't guarantee permanence.

Life is less like an equation than I once believed.

More variable.

More chaotic.

More indifferent.

And strangely, accepting that has made me calmer rather than more cynical.

Because once you stop expecting the world to be fair, you stop treating every disappointment as a personal failure. You stop demanding explanations from events that were never designed to provide them.

I still have responsibilities.

I still worry about the future.

I still walk with a cane some mornings and wonder what the next decade might look like.

But something fundamental has changed.

I no longer feel responsible for every outcome.

I no longer feel guilty for protecting my time.

I no longer feel obligated to participate in every problem that crosses my path.

That might be the greatest gift twenty-eight has given me.

Not wisdom.

Not certainty.

Permission.

Permission to step back.

Permission to leave some things unfinished.

Permission to admit that not every burden belongs on my shoulders.

Maybe that's why I keep thinking about Orpheus.

Not because he looked back.

Everybody talks about that part.

I keep thinking about the condition itself.

Walk forward.

Don't look back.

Trust that something exists even when you cannot see it.

It's a strange demand.

Especially because most of life teaches the opposite lesson.

Most of life rewards evidence.

Proof.

Verification.

Experience.

Hope, by comparison, feels almost irresponsible.

Loss has references.

Loss has data.

Loss can point to previous examples and say, "See? This happened before."

Hope has none of that.

Hope asks us to invest in futures that haven't happened yet. To trust outcomes that remain entirely theoretical. To move toward daylight long before we reach it.

Perhaps that's why Orpheus looked back.

Not because he lacked faith.

But because uncertainty is exhausting.

The future has always been harder to believe in than the past.

And maybe that's what twenty-eight feels like.

Not optimism.

Not confidence.

Certainly not certainty.

Just a growing awareness that life was never going to become orderly.

People will continue to surprise me.

Some for the better.

Some for the worse.

Friendships will end.

New ones will begin.

Plans will fail.

Other plans will succeed for reasons I probably won't fully understand.

The messages will keep arriving.

The responsibilities will keep existing.

The future will remain frustratingly impossible to predict.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped demanding answers from all of it.

I stopped treating uncertainty like a problem that needed solving.

These days, it feels more like weather.

Something you learn to walk through.

Maybe that's the real difference.

Not that life became easier.

Not that I became wiser.

Just that I finally stopped expecting the road to explain itself.

And for now, that's enough.