Everyone else is more organized. More successful. Better looking. Happier.
That guy knows how to make small talk in a meeting. She knows how to enter a party alone and fit right in. That couple has learned how to disagree without wanting to pour a bucket of water on each other.
But me? I must have missed that day, because I don’t seem to have those skills.
It’s amazing how even as we age, we can be taken right back to our most vulnerable feelings at the drop of a hat. If you grew up chubby, you think the saleswoman is laughing at you for even thinking of trying a certain style. If you weren’t the most handsome boy in school, then you just know you will never find another mate.
Hang on a second.
What about all that you have become, now that you are older?
You’re smarter.
You’re more patient (well most of the time).
You’re more accepting of flaws in others.
You are more worldly, even if you have never left your house.
I know I can go for weeks and feel competent enough, and then one stupid incident makes me feel like sitting in the dark with a large dessert. Just remembering that it may very well not be about me…maybe that person is having a bad day, maybe he or she really hasn’t learned not to discount the people around them, maybe it’s one of those annoying life lessons I need to see just how far I’ve evolved in believing in myself.
All very touchy feely I know. And yet, I think it’s so important to celebrate who we are, especially now that we are older.
Because it’s also very easy to decide that it’s too late to change, or to take risk someone actually seeing who I really am…so I might as well stay under the covers and not even bother to show up at all—especially if it’s going to hurt.
Richard Rohr, one my favorite people in the world, explores this in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. I love what he says. Here are a few of his thoughts jumbled together:
“In my opinion, this first-half-of-life task is no more than finding the starting gate. It is merely the warmup act, not the full journey….we are the clumsy stewards of our souls. All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!… We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right….”
Rohr discusses how he feels life is lived in two stages, and in the first, we are forming who we are and meeting out basic needs—but we are also preparing ourselves for the joys and the sufferings of the second phase of life. We have to go through the bad times so we can learn later how to survive and fully become who we are meant to be. He writes:
“Just remember this: no one can keep you from the second half of your own life except yourself. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except your own lack of courage, patience, and imagination. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. My conviction is that some falling part of the first journey is necessary for this to happen, so do not waste a moment of time lamenting poor parenting, lost job, failed relationship, physical handicap, gender identity, economic poverty, or even the tragedy of any kind of abuse. Pain is part of the deal. If you do not walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.”
We are enough. Grace is ours. We are where we need to be on the road, and if not, we can get there.
It’s one reason I’m okay with my wrinkles. I see them as a kind of map, not only of where I’ve been, but where I’m going.
Why let all that first-half pain go to waste? I felt it, I survived it, I plan to put it to good use—helping me get farther down the road. And the beginning of a new year is the perfect time. What about you?
“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”
Thomas Merton
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