Sometimes you find a writer who does a better job of expressing your own thoughts. These words come from Richard Brautigan-
“I’ve never really been very interested in remembering things that did not immediately catch my attention. I think this is a character weakness, but it’s a little late to anything about it now.”
“I’ve just turned 47 and I can’t go back into the past and realign my priorities in such a way as to create another personality out of them. I’m just going to have to make do with the almost five decades sum of me”
“it may not add up to the total I envisioned for myself when I was younger and not as warped as I am now”
“I looked forward to arriving at a period of grace in my life, and my late forties might be a good place to start. What I meant by grace was a more realistic approach to the process of living to arrive at perhaps some tranquility and to place a little more distance between the frustrations and agonies in my life, which are so often of my own creation.”
The above from Brautigan’s book “An Unfortunate Woman” written two years before his death. Finally I found this in “The Tokyo-Montana Express” written just a few years earlier-
“all I want to do is have a little mindless fun with the years that are left in my life”
soylent soup for the soul 
You cite Brautigan, I’ll cite Popeye:
“I yam what I yam.”
Enlightenment is obtained by learning to embrace your inner Popeye (and by eating your spinach, of course).