That’s the way that the world goes ’round
You’re up one day, the next you’re down
It’s a half-an-inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown
That’s the way that the world goes ’round
That’s The Way That The World Goes ‘Round, John Prine
Here’s last year’s grief
In the green leaf;
And all he knows is
That Time will take
All heartbreak,
And turn it to roses.
With a Bunch of Roses, Robert Nathan
Sometime tomorrow morning – I confess that I am not certain when – I will enter my eighth decade of life. The cusp of decades is a time for reflection, and the upcoming one is of special interest to me for if I complete its first half, I will be older than my father ever became.
There is a temptation to look back upon a concluding decade and classify it as happiest, saddest, most thrilling, deadliest, etc. But as strong as that temptation may be, I find that the events of the past decade are nothing more than the result of my having, over the fullness of time, blended a series of irrevocable personal choices with my genetic base material, with the resulting soup having been spiced with healthy doses of serendipity. In short, the seeds of whatever did or did not happen during the decade that ends today were sown throughout the course of a long lifetime. This suggests to me that the passing of a decade has no greater significance than that possessed by highway mile-posts.
The upcoming decade will only be different in that the personal choices I must take are yet to be made, and whatever serendipity will come my way is yet unknown. Of the two, I have the possibility of controlling only my own choices. While I would much prefer not to have my past in control of my future, I realize how impossible this is. My experience has contributed to who I am, and I can no more make decisions as if I were an infant faced for the first time with the concept of ‘choice’ than I can go back in time in order to undo one or more of all the choices I’ve made. In some dimensions time may flow backward, but not in the one we humans inhabit.
As a result of my experience, I am convinced that: (1) life deals to all of us unequal measures of pleasure and despair, with the only certainty lying in the fact that each of us will receive doses of each; and (2) the primary difference between success or failure lies in whether an individual is able to: (a) distil useful lessons from whatever hands he or she may be dealt (even from, or perhaps especially from, the shittiest of them), and (b) effectively employ the lessons learned against such portions of the future which are capable of being controlled to any extent. In other words, it all comes down to agility (both mental and physical) and attitude.
Attitude is a matter of determination; agility is adversely affected by age. So it seems to me that a stubborn insistence upon a positive outlook is the best anyone can do to ride the tides of time. If this is true, I am well positioned, because there are plenty of witnesses to the fact that I am a stubborn cuss. I might even argue that such is my chief charm (with the proof of the concept to be found in my willingness to equate ‘stubbornness’ with ‘charm’).
So I resolve to continue being stubborn, and to temper my stubbornness with a healthy regard for the well-being of others. I know these goals can be complementary and not mutually exclusive, if only the right balance can be achieved. Since the trick to finding good balance lies in one’s agility, I will apparently have to work even harder in the next decade than I’ve had to do in those past. But I do love a difficult challenge, so bring it on!
