The end of an era

I think I am done being mean on the internet.  I was trading insults with some left-winger, as I used to do for hours daily, and I started coughing uncontrollably.  I’d been smoking a pipe, and eating some food that sometimes causes congestion, but I think it had psychological roots.  Something was telling me to stop.

I’ve been clearing some space on the counter, and looked up pour-over coffee, since I’d like to get rid of my coffee pot, and there they had a number of articles on dealing with your kids leaving.  Somebody had quoted that very sad Beatles song.  You know the one.  I have two kids in college, and it makes me sad.  Everything great about having little kids is gone.  My job, now, is to wait and listen.  To wait for them, if they need me, and to listen, if they need to talk.  My job is to be there in an emergency, or where needed.  But no more.

I do think it is a feature of our age that many parents have a very hard time letting go, perhaps more than in ages past, although I have no way of knowing.  Life is just so lonely for so many people.  Couples who have been focused on parenting for a couple decades find themselves alone together.  The reason I got divorced–and now you really know I’m changing, since I am allowing shades of genuine autobiography–was I could see that day coming, 10-15-20 years in the future, and I did not want that pain and terror.  I made the right decision.  It has been a hard, hard fucking time being me for some time, but slowly I am fighting my way out of the spider webs (another fantastic Lord of the Rings metaphor), and that would not have been possible without exorbitant amounts of alone time and down time.

And I thought: I’m not getting any younger.  I’m already trying to decide how to get old.  I think I have a good  plan, which I am in the process of executing–details if and when I feel like it, but don’t hold your breath–but my God we all get old, get sick, and die.  All of us.  Trump voters.  Trump haters.  Non-voters.  Pot heads, heathens, evangelicals, dog lovers, dog haters, ice fisherman, and deer hunters.

I can stand being mean to other people as long as I can stand being mean to myself, as long as I can be cold to myself, as long as I am willing to make myself stand outside, too.

But I seem to be softening.  There is a melting going on.  There might even be a word for looking at other people as not so different from me, for looking at them with understanding, and with a smile in my heart.