It feels vaguely foolish to me talking about “life” when everything in our lives may be on the verge of being overturned by lunatics and truly evil human beings, but until that happens, I guess we all need to do the best we can, and even if and when it happens, that remains true. We need to seek out wisdom, comfort, kindness and what joy and gratitude we can create or find.
I was dreaming the other day about someone who used to be in my life. He is an ambitious man who through relentless focus and hard work has done very well financially. He is on all accounts great at his job, and paid very well for it. His wife had a child from a previous marriage, and that child is a neurotic mess, from what I can tell, and is in turn raising a child that is also a neurotic mess. His focus was always on his job. That always came first.
So we are there in dream space and he tells me that I have to come stand in a line, because a terrific, not-to-be-missed sale on stuff is coming up, and if we don’t hurry we will miss it. So I’m standing there with him, and people start cutting in line in front of me. One of them I knew, another guy who did very well for himself.
This goes on for a while, then suddenly a have a small girl over my shoulder who seems lost, and my focus shifts to her, to helping her, to helping her find her family and her way. The line sort of disappears into a sort of mist.
Now, I had been talking with my oldest the other day, about a time when she was little and had to be hauled out of a mall over my shoulder because she did not want to stop watching a dancing Santa Clause. She has become a healthy, well adjusted, successful person. She is a good person.
And it hit me that most Americans live their lives waiting for the Next Big Thing. We work and wait, work and wait. The next house, the next car, the next promotion, the next vacation: that will do it, for sure. And if not, well there’s always the line to the Next Big Thing.
If I might paraphrase and in my classify-it-how-you-will opinion improve on, a quote by John Lennon “life is what happens while you are waiting for it.”
You know what is at the end of the line? A cliff. You fall off. That is it. You wait and wait and wait, and then your time is up. Poof.
One of my jobs in this life was to interrupt the pattern of abuse and trauma from which I emerged. I have done that. That is an intrinsically valuable use of time and life energy.
And as far as YOLO I would ask this: how much time in a life can you spend skydiving, Rocky Mountain Climbing, going 3.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu?
There is a place for all that. I am not saying any of that is wrong, particularly the process of learning to embrace fear.
But I would suggest that all of us, if and when we make it to old age, will value vastly more loving deeper, speaking sweeter, and giving forgiveness we’ve been denying.