IT’S CONTAGIOUS!

Sometimes life’s lessons fall on deaf ears, and sometimes they stay part of you for a lifetime. Sometimes we are willing to listen and sometimes we shield those flaps along the side of our heads.

There is so much truth in the adage that youth is wasted on the young because it is the lessons that we learn and come to understand in our old age that could have been useful in our youth.

For instance, how many of us can understand human suffering in our teens and 20’s? How many of us took the time to reach down to help lift up someone who was abused both mentally and physically as we might do in our elderly years?

Once I was carefree, self-centered, and transfixed on my own imagined deficiencies, both physically and mentally. My self-confidence was filtered by the criticism I inflicted upon myself. I lived for today and immediate gratification never thought about tomorrow and never ever considered those around me and their feelings or emotions that ripped down their self-confidence.

But as I grew older I started to recall all those days and how they came home to me once again. I saw reflections I did not like, echoes of past statements I wish I had heeded, and the actions I took and didn’t take that filled me with guilt.

Life is like a precipice, one that looks out over a vast emptiness that only returns an echo of your past, augmented by the severity of what you did and said so long ago and far away. I can close my eyes and hear it clearer, maybe in that process seeing things as clearly as well. Shouting into that chasm I should have said: “ I believe in you!” or maybe “You can do all things you set out to do.”

This is not to say I did everything wrong or selfishly, just that it was not the most perfect of orchestration for conducting my life. There are things I did do to defy even my self-doubts, my education, my marriage, and my career. All I feel are triumphs either big or small, manifested, and on my ledger of life.

Some tribulations helped me get through the tragedies of the past, the loss of a child, the pain of a child with disabilities that I mourn every day, the infliction of depression on my children, I weathered those storms with the reliance on love and the caring of those who surrounded me, they were the product of my life choices but as a young man and an old one.