Well, my introspective Son, you seem to being doing very well. You have a gorgeous Fiancee, a faithful cat, good friends and an outstanding Family! Of course, that is my unbiased opinion. I can tell you when I look back over 74 years it has been interesting! You learn to live with your foibles and to be understanding of others strange habits. Life is a constant mixture of good, bad, and indifferent. As you get older and wiser (I hope) you realize that we are all imperfect and the trick to having a good life is to find people who can accept us as we are, not as some wish us to be.
So it turns out that my mother, the same person who voted for Richard Nixon- twice, if memory serves- has in her later years become quite the “live and let live” closet Liberal. Or perhaps I just missed the transition given the passage of time. Whatever, it strikes me (in part because Erin has pointed it out) that Mom and I have more in common than I might have imagined. I understand where I get a lot of my ideas and my values. The older I get, the more grateful I am for those things, because they helped make me who I am today.
Something about the apple not falling far from the tree….
As I grow older, I’m learning that the things I might have worried about at one point in my life seem less important. I suppose a lot of it has to do with knowing how to pick your battles…and as time goes by, I find there are fewer battles worth fighting. Not that I’m becoming a pushover, but the lines in the sand that seemed so vital and so important in the past…well, fewer and fewer of them are inviolable. There’s something to be said for leaving a battle for another day.
I’m coming to have a greater understanding of and appreciation for the things that really are the most important- the people I love and the people who love me. I’m blessed to have a large number of both in my life, which I haven’t always allowed to be the case. I’ve reached a point where it feels OK to be vulnerable and to accept people for who they are, foibles and imperfections and all…because they accept me despite mine. As a very wise person once told me, we’re ALL f——d up…just for different reasons.
I’m grateful for the knowledge that with age (in most cases) comes wisdom…and for the people who taught me that from an early age. I may not have been willing to listen way back when, but my own advancing age has helped me to understand that perhaps the lessons my parents tried to teach me really were grounded in reality, experience, and common sense. Go figure.
I guess some lessons just take some people longer to learn.
