June 28, 2023
Getting older is not for the
faint of heart. But do you want to know something? I’ve been looking at what
other folks in different age groups are going through, lately, and I’ve come to
a not-so-amazing conclusion.
Life, regardless of the age of
the person living it, is damned hard. In fact, I think it’s harder in these
times than in any previous one, despite the advent of technology and
innovation.
That’s not a negative point of
view. It’s a statement of fact. Facts, for those of you who have friends or
family members who may have forgotten, are those little nuggets of something
called truth.
Now truth is represented by
those chart-topping hits from yesteryear, “Accept responsibility for your
actions”, “My right to swing my fist ends at the edge of your nose,” and that
wildly popular little ditty, “Hello, neighbor, let me help you with that.”
Life is hard and sometimes way
too busy, but it is not hopeless. The circumstances in which we live life
may be ever-changing, but there are some things that don’t change, and it
becomes more and more important that we identify those rock-solid anchors that
help us to navigate our days and the inevitable challenges that come our way.
I can’t tell you what your
anchors are. Nor can anyone else. That’s a decision for you to make, one of the
many hard decisions that you will be faced with during your time on this earth.
Some folks make the family their
main anchor. Their family—husbands, wives, children, are the most important
thing to them. Ensuring everyone is safe, fed, housed, relatively happy, and
growing is the reason behind most of their actions.
Some choose their spiritual or
religious faith as their anchors. They have various rituals that help them get
through their daily ordeals. Their faith even helps them to prosper year in and
year out. It’s the cornerstone of their existence.
In fact, a lot of people use a
lot of different kinds of things to get through each day, and not all of them
are healthy. Our society has evolved into dangerous territory over the last few
years. Too many people live transactionally, eschewing a solid core reality for
everchanging and ever temporary satisfaction. They fix their sights on the
transitory, instead of look to the enduring.
We are urged to get it now, do
it now, which cuts out some of the more meaningful experiences that can be
garnered if we just slow down and take our time. Anticipation as a positive
experience is almost a thing of the past. And so, too, is the sense of
satisfaction garnered from knowingly doing the right thing.
My father died when I was 8,
and my personal memories are more liked freeze-framed print outs, mental photographs
that captured moments in isolation. When I was in my early adult years, I concluded
that the reason I couldn’t recall days or ordinary times in motion was because
of the trauma I suffered as a result of his death. Until it happened, you see,
I didn’t know that it could. I guess you could say that in the beginning,
my daddy was my anchor—but not even he was strong enough to deny fate.
Children in the 1960s were a
lot less sophisticated than the children of today, and that is no hyperbole.
For that reason, growing up, I
prized any time my mother was in the mood to talk about my father. There was
one time when I was trying to figure out how to handle money—which is, friends,
one of the hardest lessons we ever learn. And my mother told me that my father
had a rule when it came to whether or not he would buy something for himself.
He would look at the price and calculate out how many hours on the production
line he would have to work in order to pay for it. Then he would honestly ask
himself: do I want that something seriously enough to put in that many hours on
the line? And if the answer was yes—which unsurprisingly was rare—then he would
get it, after he’d worked those dedicated hours.
That small illustration not
only gave me a guideline to use—an anchor, if you will—it told me something
kind of sad and yet kind of noble about my father.
He clearly hated his job. As a
young man, he’d spent most of his spare time the way I spent mine as a teen—writing.
But he loved his family so much that he
deemed their survival more important than what he had to go through every day
at work to ensure it.
I consider that knowledge as a
magnificent legacy from the man who, through it, continues on to be my anchor after
his death, and is still so to this day.
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
No comments:
Post a Comment