I’m fifty-six years old.
I’ve watched this planet swing around the sun for 224 seasons, seeing winter melting into spring, spring blossoming into summer, summer sizzling into autumn, and autumn falling headlong once again into winter.
When I was eighteen, I knew everything, and each new year since has been an exercise in realizing just how much I don’t know. And yet, I have learned a few things on this long road, life lessons that have served me well. I’ll share some of them with you here, in no particular order, i they hope that they might be helpful.
Almost everything you take for granted will eventually end. When I was a kid, we drove mostly stick-shift cars, played our music on vinyl records and 8-track tapes, watched our television on squat picture-tube TVs that had “big screens” that were 25″ from corner to corner (and we still had a black-and-white set!), and called our family on landlines or pay phones. As a kid, I assumed things had always been that way. And yet now, fifty years later, many of those things no longer exist or are, at best, retro niche products. Each of us livs in a particular slice in time, and it is unlike anything that has come before or will come after.
Savor your moment, and open yourself up to the changes which will inevitably come.
Friends and family are more important than money and things. As a kid, I also dreamt of being rich and famous, rising to the top of the NY Times book list and being a beloved and celebrated writer. I still desire those things. But what has made my life most enjoyable, has kept me grounded, are my relationships with friends and family. They have provided me with riches beyond measure – sunny afternoons hanging out together at the coffee shop, boisterous evenings at dinner engaged in animated conversation. Hands held when life becomes too much to bear alone, and warm embraces when my soul is empty and needs to be refilled.
Relationships are the wine that makes life a meal worth savoring. Drink of them often and deeply.
Everyone leaves, eventually. In the first thirty years of my life or so, I was extremely lucky. I lost few friends and no family members, and didn’t give too much thought to grief, loss, and sorrow. Then my Grandpa John passed away, followed by Grandpa Pete, Grandma Joyce and Grandma Hazel, my stepmother Barbara, and Mark’s beloved mother Helen (who delighted in calling me tonto, her term of endearment for me which essentially means silly idiot). In recent years, some of our friends have passed away too, leaving holes in our lives that aren’t easily filled.
Spend time with those who are precious to you, while you can, and keep a place for each of those you lose in your heart, your memory of them an enduring mark left on the world by their presence.
It’s okay to feel two contradictory things at once. I feel this often in my writing career. Someone else has a success I haven’t yet reached, and I feel joy for them and sadness for myself. This is perfectly normal – it’s not something to be ashamed about. We humans are complicated creatures – we can hold more than one idea, thought, or emotion in our heads at the same time. We can be sad at the loss of a friend, while being relieved that they are no longer suffering. We can miss them terribly while smiling and laughing about who they were when they were with us.
Let yourself feel what you feel, even if it seems contradictory and uncomfortable. You are only human – beautiful, complex, and amazing.
We are not as divided as we fear we are. We are living in a dark moment, where politics has cleaved our world in two, especially here in the States. But as Jon Stewart famously pointed out, when we approach a tunnel, we each take turns as the freeway narrows from five lanes to two. One after the other, with no thought to the ideology, religion, or orientation of the person in the car next to us. Those on the top seek to divide us, to pit us against one another, but at the end of the day, my neighbors still buy milk at the same store I do. Still have family who loves them, children they worry about, and bills to pay. I have hope for a world where we all start to realize this again, and find a way together past this fraught moment we all find ourselves in.
Let yourself remember that we are all fallible human beings, and that for better or worse, we are in this together.
Time will carry us past all of this. I saved this one for last, because it’s one of the most powerful things I ever came to terms with. It has gotten me through countless heartaches and moments of loss and sorrow, No matter how bad things are today, time continually moves us forward. It’s a river that flows in only one direction.
Close your eyes and hold on, and it will carry you past whatever is weighing on you to a brand new day, where you can gather your strength and try again.
I’m sure there are many more, but these are the ones that presented themselves to me this beautiful sunny morning. I hope they help you in some small way as they have helped me.
What wisdom has age granted you, my wonderful readers?