Life is difficult.
This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.
It is a great truth because once we clearly see this truth,
we transcend it.
Once we truly know that life is difficult -
once we truly understand and accept it -
then life is no longer difficult.
Because once it is accepted,
the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
- M. Scott Peck, MD, The Road Less Travelled
Remember when you were a kid and couldn't wait to be older/an adult to take advantage of the greatly enhanced freedoms that came with it? How's that working out exactly? As for me, well, as I sit here typing in front of my computer screen looking at my "I Can't Adult Today" sign (a thoughtful gift from my wonderful wife), I'm torn: truth be told I enjoy my adult life so that I wouldn't want to go back to being a kid again ... but I also now know something that I really wish my parents and/or other elders would have told me back in the day: adulting is much harder than it looks.
In my formative years, if you'd told me that by 55 years of age I would live a life that can be accurately described as a rollercoaster - generally fun and thrilling, but also occasionally and meaningfully nauseating - I wouldn't have believed you: my own parents' lives - and those of the elders whom I also observed - were beset with challenges but on the whole happy.
And, yet, as I write this, I realize that this characterization may, in fact, be wrong: upon closer examination - with my adult life experience and lens on now - I can see that adult life was harder for my loved ones than I appreciated at the time, but I only focused on the part of greatest interest to me, the enhanced freedom part. I totally underappreciated and underestimated the challenging side ... and therein lies the lesson that I hope to pass on.
In six words: adulting is harder than it looks.
Certainly the enhanced freedoms part of adult life is the easiest to value. I get to make the vast majority of the decisions in my life, with the exception of those I make interdependently with my spouse/life partner. And in this choosing is the opportunity to create, for the most part, the life that I want (subject, of course, to the vagaries of fate and the constraints of the level of resources accessible that we all face). So this part of adulting is great ... and, apparently, the only one that I appreciated sufficiently in my youth.
The flip side of the adulting opportunity, the responsibility to deal with the unique vagaries of fate to which we are all subject, is another matter entirely. Man, did I miss this totally as a kid: in a word, adulting is hard!
But the evidence was there to see when I was young, but I made the perfectly understandable and normal choice to be oblivious to it: my parents' lives involved a great deal of struggle, too. There was the challenge of two very different people being and staying married for over four decades. There was the challenge of their respective/twin addictions. There was the challenge of being comfortably middle class enough not to want for necessities, but insufficiently so as to have many luxuries that would have made the journey appreciably more fulfilling and fun.
For example, my mother's dream was to travel in her retirement. She toiled mightily and absorbingly for years trying to impart knowledge, wisdom and life skills to her students, all the while expecting that she would be able to retire in her sixties and see in person that big wide world that she had encouraged so many others to explore through the pages of books.
But it was not to be: less than a year into her retirement and less than a week into her relocation to her new home in the South (which would also make it easier for her to care for my aging, ailing grandmother), she had a series of heart attacks and open heart surgery, a leg amputated and, for all intents and purposes, her dreams of a life of leisure and exploration ended. She had waited more than 30 years for something that would never be....
When I was young, so enamored of the freedom of adulthood, I failed to learn the other - and, I would argue, more important - lesson of life: with greater freedom comes much greater responsibility and therein lies the true challenge of adult life.
Don't get me wrong, the freedom part can be challenging at times ... but, invariably, these are good problems to have. (Or, as 'woke' folks describe them, 'First World' problems.) And there is a major lesson hiding in all of that wonderment that virtually all of us fail to appreciate: success brings with it challenges that must be addressed, too.
Think about it: The Beatles are considered by many to be the greatest musical group of all time ... but even they couldn't handle being at the pinnacle of their chosen vocation for less than a decade. So, too, with Mike Tyson, who could arguably be described as having the potential to have been the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time ... except that he couldn't manage life outside of the ring and ended up aborting his career within it as well. (Fill in your favorite examples here as well.)
In other words, there's something that the Rolling Stones figured out that the Beatles didn't, which is why they continue to defy the odds and prance in spandex six decades later. So, too, with ... well, I can't come up with a modern boxing analogy, but some of the older generation that preceded Tyson managed to stay on top for a lot longer than he did (admittedly, it turns out, to their physical detriment). And therein lies the point: even success requires the life skill to handle it (something that I learned the hard way at my own previous professional and personal peak a decade ago).
The greater responsibility part of adulthood is the more obvious and straightforward of the challenges, but this doesn't make it inherently more manageable. Just because we know life is gonna throw us curve balls doesn't necessarily means that we'll be able to hit them, and when we whiff we end up being clear on the need for a far greater and deeper set of coping skills than we originally anticipated. Just because we know the pitch is coming doesn't mean that it won't strike us out.
And therein lies the lesson that I hope to share, especially with my younger loved ones and the next generation: we are well advised in life to prepare for the storm especially when it doesn't appear to be on the horizon, because the only certainty to which we can subscribe is that it is, indeed, coming ... multiple times.
At mid-life, I don't have a single friend or loved one who hasn't experienced the loss of a job or a marriage or an appreciable illness or.... And Lord knows, I've experienced them all, as did my parents. The storm is coming, the question is whether we'll be adult (read = mature) enough to prepare for it (or, more accurately, them).
Among the best preparations, I have learned, are an ever-widening web of strong, loving relationships, a personal spirituality that centers and comforts us and a willingness to be accepting of our unique vagaries of fate. In raging against the storm, I have found, we do the most damage. By accepting its legitimacy and presence, on the other hand, we can weather it and learn from the experience. Turns out that Buddhist principle is true that every circumstance in life (especially the ones that we perceive negatively) is trying to teach us something, the question being whether we'll choose to be open to learning the lesson.
And another Buddhist principle has worked for me, too: Years ago, during a period of profound turbulence in my own life, I decided to learn how to meditate in an effort to weather it more effectively. And I failed. I couldn't sit quietly and quiet my mind as the thoughts - all random, some quite disturbing (which, I now realize, means revealing) - just kept coming and coming and coming. A forced, 30-minute meditation session often left me more stressed than before because I could now add the frustration of not being able to calm myself to the long list of challenges with which I was already dealing.
And then I read somewhere that the point was not to achieve quiet but to achieve acceptance and release: that I should acknowledge the visions, emotions and thoughts that came up, name them and then release them. The relief, it turned out, was in the letting go. So, I learned to say, "this feeling is anger" and then to let it go and "this feeling is hurt/pain" and let it go and "this feeling is confusion" and let it go and so on. And I felt better having found a type of meditation that I could actually practice.
But I kept reading and then discovered something even better: one sage suggested that meditation was the process of finding and experiencing the uniquely sacred in yourself and life and that if sitting quietly and clearing your head didn't work, you should find an alternative that did. And this was a revelation because I realized something that I had always known but not fully appreciated: reading is my meditation. When I am in the journey of the pages I am awash in what's sacred to me, at once fully vibing on the wisdom to be gleaned from whatever I'm reading but also fully present and grateful for the moment and the circumstances that create it. In sum, when I read, I feel in touch with my deepest reality and grateful for this experience. And in the temperate times when I can open the window, the song of nature makes this experience even more sublime....
Even better, to this enhanced awareness of and appreciation for a uniquely meaningful meditative practice I can now add writing. A few years ago, a dear friend (whose identity, truthfully, I can't even remember), mentioned that she had been touched by something I wrote and encouraged me to write more. Writing had always been an advanced skill of mine - having an English teacher for a mother and a singularly gifted and inspiring priest for an English teacher in high school certainly helped immensely! - and I had neglected it for the most part in my adult life. I had shut off the creative pursuit in favor of other supposedly more urgent pursuits like raising my family, perfecting my golf game, developing myself as a leader and executive professionally and in my community, etc. But, encouraged by this recognition, I decided to re-discover my gift.
And what a fulfilling, enlivening and elevating journey it has been! In the solace of my thoughts, as I parse my reality and seek to glean meaningful learnings from it, I am at peace ... and I also can create something that others find meaningful, too. Which is why I'm sharing this piece, both because its development has been helpful to me and because it has the potential to be helpful to you, Dear Reader, too.
Which brings me back to where I started this jaunt, wishing that my elders had been more explicit with me about the challenges of adult life. First, I accept that maybe they were but I just wasn't mature enough to listen. More importantly, I've learned from this circumstance and will not repeat it: you can be assured that I'll share with my own children and the next generation the need to be more prepared than is obvious to address the inevitable challenges that life will present.
And yet, again, I wouldn't trade this challenging adult life to return to being a kid. As much as I may be tempted to be wistful about 'lost' or 'wasted' or 'underleveraged' time in my past life, I realize that I can't reclaim it or change it in any way, so I'm compelled to learn from it and go forward living differently and better. Among the ways that this evidences itself is a continuing imperative to savor the freedoms of life and to embraces its challenges as learning opportunities/wisdom developers.
In the end, this is all that I have in this one journey through this time and space which which I'm gifted: to learn to from life and, in so doing, to make ever more fulfilling choices, one of the most important of which is to share with others along the way. As hard as it sometimes is to accept, this will be my legacy, what lingers long after I'm gone physically: the impression that I made in the lives of others and the meaning that I shared in my earthly time.
And as I write this, I realize that, indeed, long ago, I was exposed to this wisdom but wasn't yet mature enough to appreciate it fully. As the Bard imparted through Hamlet more than half a millennium ago:
To be or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
or to take arms against a sea of trouble
and by opposing end them.
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