This needs to be said first. It’s been seventy years. Inside, I’m still the same Little League, first baseman looking out over the field for the next ground ball or pop-fly or the next play at the plate. Somewhere, inside, I haven’t changed. My voice to myself is the same voice I’ve always heard. That doesn’t seem confusing to me.
My first thoughts are about privilege. Living these years is a privilege that has been denied to so many of my friends. The only tribute I can pay to those who have gone is to live fully, with joy and love. To never waste a minute I share with them in my heart. That is the nearest remedy to grief I know.
"We call that person who has lost a father an orphan and a widower a man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, what do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence." That's just beautiful and you can feel the grief of the 19th-century gentleman who wrote it.
I've also heard and repeated this quote: “If our parents are very lucky,
we are all born to be orphans.”
The simple and ultimately,, perhaps, the most profound, "You were here and it mattered."
Every year, no matter our age, gives the opportunity to grow, to become better informed. The number of the year or the number of years doesn’t change that opportunity. It is a great disappointment, so much of what you learn can’t change the past.
Change the past. People often wish they could go back and change one thing or another. I never think that way. There has never been a reason to believe, if I had it to do over again, I would be any smarter. All things considered, I’ve never met anyone who would be smarter. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s a useless exercise.
A few years ago it occurred to me that we should live every day of our lives as though we were going to live a hundred years with only the caveat that, if we would be known for that century by what we did today, what would that be? Not sure where that came from. Had I died a year younger I never would have had that thought. Privilege.
I do wish someone had sat me down when I was 20 and told me that and made me sit until I actually understood it. That would have been a blessing, not a privilege but it didn’t happen. I had to wait. I wonder what I’ll learn next year. At 70, that’s the real trick, isn’t it?
The real trick. Someone said, what we don’t understand tends to look like a conspiracy or a magic trick. Conspiracies, real or imagined are just confederacies of dunces and, of course, magic is just sleight of hand. The operative phrase is, “what we don’t understand”. It’s not some trick to identify what we don’t understand. It’s a matter of developing a systematic approach to answering our own questions. I’ve always said, the most valuable thing I learned in college was how to read systematically, no matter the subject. How to progress from the general to the specific. A friend of mine refined the idea further by simply saying, they had taught him how to learn. We tend to think of college like it’s some sort of trade school. That’s not quite right. Another friend said college was a way to prove you could be relied on to do your chores on time. In a way, that’s closer.
Well, I’m never going to play in any major league. I’m never going to be invited to any hall of fame. Neither will you but that’s not why we played little league. That’s not why tomorrow will include at least some small effort at that potential century.
I thought there would be more to this when I sat down but life isn’t about milestones or calendars. It’s not about some biblical allotment we might be granted. It’s not about the whim of some god hinged to our fate. It is about our simple faith and expectation in our idea of tomorrow.
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