This is for people over age 35. All others please skip to the next article. The rest of you can skip, too, if you're looking for the wisdom of a sage. The admitted fact is, I've hardly begun to comprehend the phenomena of life and age, and the best I can offer are a few Andy Rooney-like observations.
I turned 40 a few weeks ago, having graciously moved on from 39 after only one year. (Since “life begins at 40,” I decided to get on with it.) With 40 being the milestone that it is, I've pondered whether life—assuming I'll reach my life expectancy—is too short or just about right.
One thing we older folk understand (but the kids don't, which is why I excused them) is how 15 or 20 years can seem like four or five. Twenty years ago I was half way through college, which was really, it seems, only about four years ago. After all, I still haven't learned everything, I'm still not rich or ready to retire, and I still picture myself as being about college age. So yes, I'd say it's been about four years since I finished school!
At age 40, I am 25 years away from age 65. That would translate to about six years, I'd say, except that since time goes faster and faster the older we get, we have to adjust: make it five years to age 65; add another year to take me all the way to the end. My answer is, therefore, that life is indeed too short. I'll never be able to get it all lived by then!
On the other hand, consider that I spent five years (in real time) just figuring out I was gay. [Hey, that was in the olden days—we all thought gays were dirty old men... and since we weren’t that, we must not have been the other!] I spent at least that long discovering that corporate politics exist. It took me more than ten years, real time, to learn to like onions—to say nothing of okra—and about that long to fine-tune a good method of balancing my bank statement. Being from Kansas, it took me until about age 25 to discover black people, and only in recent years have I become aware that women aren't always treated so well. Call me a slow learner.
The fact is, however, that today I could do or learn all of those sorts of things much more quickly. In that sense, four or five years might now be worth 20 or 25, and my life experiences between now and age 65 could, therefore, be the equivalent of life to about age 130! Maybe life is long enough after all.
Silly Andy Rooney talk? Maybe. But it is true that I feel infinitely better equipped to experience and enjoy life effectively and efficiently today than I did even five years ago. In other words, it seems that a moment of loving today can be worth a week of it yesterday. A year of fulfillment today might be worth a whole decade of figuring out what fulfillment is.
In many ways I wonder if it takes us 40 years just to begin to feel we're on the right track in life. I suppose some people might feel it almost from birth, some never at all. I do know it feels better to believe you're on the right track than to feel you're not even on one.
Maybe that's the way to answer the question of whether life is too short. As long as we're on the right track—moving, learning, growing, loving—it's easier to believe life isn't too short. Even if it ends tomorrow, ending on the right track might somehow make it all okay—even if we end up missing The Color Purple and a trip we planned for August.
Besides, unless there's something I haven't heard about, that's as far as anyone can ever get anyway: on the right track toward something.
From the Kinship Connection
© by Larry Hallock
