Seize The Day

My father was going to retire and then go to Europe. Instead, he retired and then he died.  "Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live." That quote by Margaret Fuller pretty well sums it all up. The only thing you will regret on your deathbed will be the things you didn't get to do. He had made the trip once and very much wanted to go back, free from the time line dictated by the workplace. For my dad, there would not be another stroll through Piccadilly Circus, no cruise along the Seine and no view from the Eiffel Tower. 

I was 24 when he passed away and, even though I wasn't a child, I was certainly in my formative years for learning to become an adult. His death shaped and formed my outlook on work and life and my adamant belief that if I don't get to do something right away I may never get to do it.

My dad, God rest his friendly soul, drove over 90 miles round trip on his commute to his contracts administrator job. East on the flat I-10 from Houston's western suburbs, past the skyscrapers and south on I-45 to the marshy bay area, almost to Galveston, and then back home at 5 o'clock  to our little ranch style house. He ate dinner and watched the news in his burgundy leather chair. He ate an apple and tossed our dachshund the core. He was off to bed by 10:30. It was the nightly routine. 

He was a model employee who sat behind the same gray metal desk for 47 years. His sense of loyalty was born from the fact that his employer hired him when no one else would. He was an amputee who lost his leg to gangrene when he was 12 years old. It was horrible timing; penicillin was discovered a few years after the infection claimed his leg. When he landed his job there were no laws protecting the disabled and I can imagine how grateful he was to be hired.

I think he was happy. I can't imagine doing something you hated, day in and day out, for 47 years. I believe a lot of what kept his pedals to the work a day metal was an abiding fear that he would never find another job. Looking back, I am immensely proud of his dedication. Growing up, I swore I never wanted a life like that.

His death had a profound influence on my own life strategy. I never wanted to put off until tomorrow any experience that I could have today. I'm sure I was deep down worried that my own retirement age may never come or that I would hit 65 and they'd be pulling the sheet over me.  Always, in the back of my mind, was the thought that I had to seize the day and make it all count because my days may be numbered. Henry David Thoreau said "you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment." 

All children take something from their parents' lives and make it a part of their own. They also refuse to go down certain paths that their parents have paved. That addition and subtraction, the traits embraced and those that are pushed away, make an adult child complete. From a parent's loss, a child can learn.

How Much Do We Tell Our Children?

There is a grove of pines so lanky and tall that each one is trying to outgrow the next to reach their piece of open sky. Below the trees no grass grows and the dirt is carpeted with the pines' discarded needles and cones. The air may be muggy but the grove floor is cool and shaded and attracts a daily pilgrimage of teens who sit in a circle to talk, solve the problems of their world and pass joints 'round and 'round. It's not 2011. It's 1976. Those high school kids are now grown and most are, will, or have been parents to their own teens.

The visual sensory overload of the sixties swung back and forth on our black and white TV sets.  The pendulum tick tocked  from Bonanza, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Andy Griffith Show to horrific images of Vietnam, the setbacks and promise of the Civil Rights Movement, Free Love and the tie dyed drug culture of Haight-Ashbury. The young children of the sixties sat cross legged in front of their console TVs and watched it all unfold.

The sixties flowed into the seventies and the teens in my neighborhood, who were raised on that visual feast and famine, had cars and a little too much money. The grove of trees wasn't tucked away and secluded; it was on high school property and the number of students who sat in that circle was way too large for teachers, or the police who parked and watched from a block away, to disperse.

Crazy times. And just how much of your past do you share with your own children? I've told mine my life story. I've doled out information in snippets and parcels in moments that I thought would have the most impact. The piece of information that I have made abundantly clear is that I always had a mooring and a moral compass deep within my soul and that if there was one thing I would wish for them it is that they hold fast to their anchor and follow their own moral compass when life and times get crazy. Not if. When.

I've slogged through some swamps and scaled some proverbial mountains. We all have. My children will, too. I can tell them what may lay ahead but I can't live their lives for them. I can show them the way but I can't go with them. I can share my faults and my transgressions and the impact they had on my own life. I can stand beside them when they falter and celebrate when they're back on their feet. I can help reset their compass and drop their anchor in calmer water.

Hold Your Own Hand

  
"Friendship with oneself is all important because without it one cannot be friends with anybody else in the world."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

What a smart gal that Eleanor was. Of all the things I've tried to teach my own children this quote is at the very heart of my big lesson plan for life. Being your own friend is hard. It means you have to accept your flaws and your quirks and love yourself anyway. You have to know that absolutely no one is perfect, yourself included. You have to take a good hard look at yourself and refuse to look away until you take it all in...and you have to carry that mirror with you all the time. See the faults and imperfections? That's what makes us human and since we're human we have the ability to smooth our rough spots-no matter how long they've been there. Are we going to slip up and screw up time after time? Of course we are.

I'm certainly no psychologist but I like to think I have common sense. As parents, we set the tone for our children's inner monologue.  I've noticed that the people with the harshest inner monologue are the ones who want to look away when faced with the mirror. They have a difficult time keeping and maintaining friendships because they never learned how to be their own friend. Their parents outer monologue, directed at them, became their inner monologue.

"You're fat."
"You're spoiled."
"You're stupid."
"You're trouble."

It sure would be nice to end all that negative dialogue but I'm not Pollyanna enough to believe that it's going to happen. Success would be just one person holding up a mirror and daring to not turn away. Success would be one person shutting off the negative thought stream and learning to hold their own hand.