Youth may be wasted on the young, but age isn’t wasted on the old. We live as long as we do for a reason. In the first phase of our lives, we’re getting ready. All our systems are coming online, downloading, integrating. We’re figuring out how to best use them. We discover what our talents are, as well as the strengths and vulnerabilities in our characters.
In the second phase, we’re running full out. We’re getting married and having kids. We’re developing our careers, making money. We’re gaining confidence in our abilities. We transit from trying to work on our weaknesses to coming from our strengths.
In the third stage of the journey, we’re consolidating our gains. We’re sending our kids off as they transition from their first to the second phases. We slow down a little, rounding the turn to the last stretch, and as we slow down, we reexamine what’s important. It’s no longer about making money or being recognized. It becomes about giving away. Instead of: What can I get? It’s: What can I give? Through enlightened self-interest, we realize that we get only by giving. The more we give, the more we get. Give it all away, have it all.
Add in the final phase of a reasonably long life, and we don’t want anything anymore. I once asked an old man why he seemed to be at peace while I wasn’t. He replied: Your problem is that you still want something. I don’t. In the fourth phase, even though we’re running out of it, time in that final stage of life becomes our ally, and life is no longer a race. Our job now is to pass on what we’ve learned before we reach the finish line. We realize that it doesn’t matter who finishes first or whether we even finish at all.
Yet if that line is death, then we all finish, don’t we? In that final phase of living, we realize that our dreams of success may not be the true purpose of our lives. In fact, the end aims of our lives, as dreamt up in our youth, may be the opposite of what our deeper selves aims for.
You don’t choose the super-objective of your life as much as it chooses you. You may think your life drives you toward a certain end state, and that it’s the objective toward which you reach and stretch and strive that matters. Yet to your deeper self, the end may be incidental to what happens along the way. It’s ironic, but the end may not matter at all. It’s what you’ve gathered along the road up ’til now that’s harvested in that last phase. And it’s not the money or things you’ve collected along the way. It’s what you’ve accomplished along that racetrack that becomes your destiny. And your deeper self isn’t interested in plaques and trophies.
Doesn’t matter where you finish compared to everyone else. Always, there’s someone ahead or someone behind. Your deeper self doesn’t care where you finish. It doesn’t care how your life ends. It only concerns itself with what you do along the way, in your life’s most ordinary moments. The ends sought by your deeper self, you regard as mere means. How do you treat the landscaper? You see them as ends to the means of a great-looking lawn. Did you let the other guy go first into the merge lane? You needed to get to your kid’s orthodontist appointment on time. And the ends you’ve worked toward your whole life? The house? The 401(k)? getting your daughter into Yale? They’re just means to your deepest self. Your finish line – success in the way you’ve come to define it – is a mere mile marker to your deeper self.
As you get older, you may think you’re running out of time, but time is the thing you make the least of when you have the most of it. When you’ll make the most of time, you’ll have the least of it left. Time is that strange enemy which, by forcing us to choose how we spend it, ends up being our best friend in the end.
© 2022 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23
Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Four of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within