Don't Take Yourself Too Seriously and Enjoy Life

I want to give a big shout-out to Don Cole as it was something he wrote on the I grew up in Pasadena, Tx Facebook Page that sparked my thinking for this blog entry.
 

I had to be one of the last people of my generation to embrace social media in general and Face Book in particular. It just seemed silly to me. What would make anyone post what they had for breakfast complete with photo for the world to see? Better yet, what makes them think I am interested in what they had for breakfast?

After time and pressure from friends and colleagues I finally caved-in and signed-up for a Facebook account and was off and running. I started with no friends and now I have hundreds. I discovered that it was a powerful platform for making ones voice heard. I used it to help with my High School Reunion and I used it to oppose a name change for my College (You can read about that in some of the earlier postings on this blog) and I have used it countless time to express my feelings and thinking which were often opposed to one another. Oh yea, and I have used it to display where I've been and what I have been doing and that is part of the genius of Facebook.

For many it is a place to vent their frustrations. My only advice with venting is that you choose your words carefully for Facebook is full of ravenous wolves ready to pounce on your every word. Others seem to see it as their personal political, moral, ethical and/or religious soapbox. I suggest you just politely listen and then go your own way and ignore the ones you don't like unless of course you enjoy debate. More than likely though what  you'll get is an argument.  Get tired of it just click "hide" get really tired of it the click "unfriend."

What I really like about Facebook is that it has allowed me to become reacquainted with my own life as I have discovered friends from my past. Truth is, I have friends on my Face Book "Friends List" from every stage of my life. It is such a marvelous reminder of the Tapestry of my life just to see the names of people who knew me early in my life listed right alongside of those who I met just last week. I know better now what the song writer meant when he penned "trials dark on every hand and we cannot understand all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed promised land." Facebook has been the vehicle that reminds me how different and how much the same our life journeys are.

I join my Facebook Friend, Don Cole, in asking, "What happened to all those years?"  Friends have said to me more than once, "My how the time flies when your having fun" and I remember replying "Fun or not time does seem to fly." But then I remember that time is merely a tool for measuring our movement through life. It is how that life is lived that matters.

The human mind being created after the fashion of the mind of God and our most remarkable feature as a human has this uncanny ability to make time seem irrelevant. Things that happened in our youth live on in our minds as though they happened just yesterday. Scripture speaks of God being the same "yesterday, today, and tomorrow." I have this feeling that there is a sense in which the same is true of those "created in His image and after his likeness."  Perhaps, one day I'll talk about what this means for the belief that we are eternal spirits.

Don spoke in his posting about how it seems like no time at all has passed since we were just kids living a simple life in a small town. He talked about time flying by and how we wonder how it could have slipped by so quickly without our noticing that it had passed until we reach maturity (old age). He concluded that we must have been in some sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep for decades to awaken to the senior life with surroundings and times so seemingly strange to us now.

I share that thought to some degree. The Apostle Paul likened life to a race and I reckon he was right about that. I once fancied myself a "track star" in junior high school running the quarter mile sprint and high jumping. I can still hear my coach saying, "On your money, get ready, get set . . . go" except instead of saying "go" he'd blow his whistle. I liken those early years to the "on your money, get ready, get set" part of that instruction. It was a slow deliberate pace where you took note of the details of getting into the starting blocks and making sure you didn't "jump the gun." But when that whistle blew it was an all-out run. While the race was being run there was "no time to stop and smell the roses." At least not if we expected to win or even finish the race.

However, there were plenty of time between races when  we could have and perhaps should have slowed down and soaked in a little life. Maybe had we done so those intervening years would not seem like such a blur. But, as they say these days, "It is what it is" . . .  whatever that really means.

However we didn't, like Rip Van Winkle, sleep through the last forty years. We just didn't pay attention. We were too busy. We had to finish our education either in institutions of formal higher education or the school of hard knocks. We got jobs; we fought our war or protested fighting it; we started a career; we married and started a family. Many of us have buried our parents and the rest have become care givers as we struggle with our own weakness of the flesh. It wasn't that we didn't think about stopping and smelling the roses, we just couldn't seem to find a time to work it in our busy lives.

I guess it just wasn't important to us at the time. After all, we did seem to find a way to do what we wanted to at the time. I think we allowed the urgencies (squeaky wheels) in our life to take the place of the better things. As Jesus told Martha, she didn't choose a bad thing Mary just chose the better thing.

Somehow . . .  somewhere along the way our priorities got changed. As my friend Don Cole put it, "Adulthood, responsibility and choice of lifestyles will do that. Lying in a lush bed of fresh spring clover and searching the cloud formations for make-believe animals no longer are high priorities to us now. Seniors scour at the sudden thunder rainstorm rather than try to run barefoot between the raindrops."

Ah, but that image of God thing comes back and our minds have, as I have said earlier, have this

uncanny ability to make "time stand still" and as the intro to the original Lone Ranger series always began "We go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear." I still appreciate the smell of fresh cut grass or the air after a Spring shower. I stand on the porch during thunderstorms to watch the lightening and hear the thunder. And, yes, I'd jump in the puddles (maybe with a little less force) if I weren't worried about breaking a hip.

This is not really an article about nostalgia. It is more like an advice column. So here is my advice. As important as it is for us to come to the end of life's with a fist full of memories it is more important that we enjoy the moment in which we are living. For those of us nearing the end of life that involves a lot of remembering but for those not where we are there is still time to build some memories.

Remember that time with your family is more important than time on the job. My friend, don't be fooled, there is no such thing as quality time without quantity of time. Reconnect with friends of a day gone by, touch base with cousins and kin who have not been seen in far to many years. Don't make funerals your family reunion. Express your love to those you love.

Try smiling more and crying less. Hang out with children.  Laugh and smile at every opportunity to do so.  Truth is, none of us knows how much time we have. As I look back over the years I think of those friends who will never grow old because they died young. I attend High School reunions and am reminded that the rest of us a growing old . . . well at least most of us look like we are. Father time and mother nature have not been as kind as mom and dad.  You may not have as many years ahead of you as you have behind you, but they can be the best years of your life if you just don’t take yourself too seriously.

 

BTW - One of the reasons some of us can not see each other for years but when we do get together again it is as if we have never been apart is nothing happened between meetings. Give it some thoughts and stay connected.

 My latest sun is sinkin' fast
My race is nearly run
My strongest trials now are past
My triumph has begun