An older gentlemen I esteem told me years ago that everything went to hell once you hit age 50. I was in my 40s at the time, still relatively immortal. I rolled my eyes discreetly, felt sad that he was apparently turning into a tedious old curmudgeon, and told myself that bleak and grumpy negativity would never consume me.
It hasn’t consumed me. But I confess, as I near the end of my 50s, that it nibbles away at my edges. If I don’t keep turning the Oreo, fear and futility threaten to eat into the sweet creamy center of the Missy cookie. While I’m not quite ready to tell Esteemed Friend that he was right, I’ll concede, now, that he has some street cred.
What he didn’t say was that maturity also brings blissful freedom from The Self, freedom that allows me to say “oh, what the hell,” and shrug off notion that I am personally important.
This is not bleak, grumpy, or negative!
This is a gift that offsets all the depressing stuff – the wrinkles and the sags and the twinges and the fat and the bifocals and the fact that you see your grandmother when you catch sight of your tired-ass self in the misty grocery store mirror over the produce section at the end of a long day.
One hundred eight billion people have lived and died on the planet since humans became human, and that’s a conservative estimate. It’s impossible to imagine that number (although saying it in your best Carl Sagan voice helps).
One hundred eight billion people! There is nothing new under the sun. My great thoughts, as I suppose them — my loves and hopes and experiences and perceptions — are not unique. Likewise my worries and fears and sorrows. It’s all been said and done and felt before.
This lifts a huge weight from my shoulders! I do not have to solve the problem of existence or personify perfection to show the world how it ought to be done. I am just one of one hundred eight billion, along for the ride.
Yet no passenger has ever been quite like me — or you — in that traveling crowd of billions. We’re unimportant and extra special, all at once. That makes for a heady trip.
Love it!
Thank you, Mary! I figured this one was a bomb, since there was no feedback at all, in any venue, private or public. Not that I’m pathetically needy or anything :-)
So true – each of us are “unimportant” and yet “extra special”. Well said. Sentiments I need to hear as I get nearer and nearer to my eighth decade on this earth!
We’re reading! I had to come search it out, thought. “It’s been a while since I’ve heard from Frankincense & Mirth,” I thought.