“If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d taken better care of myself.”
Happy New Year! I’m sure someone else said it before, but the first time I saw it was in an article by Orly Hood. His assessment of life went something like, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d taken better care of myself.” Well, I don’t know if I would have taken better care of myself, but when I was a young man, I gave very little thought to being as old as I am now.
Someone on Facebook put it like this, “It was a lot more fun being in my 20s back in the 70s than being in my 70s here in the 20s.” One time I asked my mama if she’d like to go back and do it again. I no sooner had asked the question when she snapped back a quick, “No!” It would be too much to have to live through it all over, she said.
I can see her point. Now, if I could leave out the unpleasantries, I might try going back and reliving a day or two. But I’d probably end up like Emily in the play, “Our Town.” After Emily (spoiler alert!) dies, she is allowed to go back and observe one day in her life. Others in the afterlife try to warn her against that choice. But she chooses her 12th birthday. Now, it’s been a while since senior English in high school, so my memory is a bit fuzzy, but Emily discovers the most mundane things that happened that day were miraculous in hindsight.
I figure we’d all be that way if we could pick a day of our younger life and go back to observe. It all would be a lot more wonderful in retrospect than it seemed while we lived it because we’re looking back through a filter of years. We’re eyeing events of that day from what we learned from those experiences. The mistakes taught us lessons, and the good things are what we’ve tried to pass down to our families.
We’re coming out of a great example of that with Christmas. I remember the excitement of Christmases I had as a child. I try to generate that feeling for the kids, no matter how old I am. Not by doing the same things, necessarily, but recreating the same atmosphere of excitement and expectation. That’s how we relive our youth. We pass on to others the good things we gleaned from life along the way.
I figure we’d all be that way if we could pick a day of our younger life and go back to observe. It all would be a lot more wonderful in retrospect than it seemed while we lived it because we’re looking back through a filter of years.
Heading into the new year, I find myself in a position I never even thought about before now. With the passing of my brother this year, I am now the oldest person in my family on my mother’s side. There is no one left to call to refresh my memory about events of the past. I’m it. I wonder now, if all the elders in my family, when they got to be the oldest, knew no more about life than I do.
Scary thought to start the new year!
