Open up your heart and you'll find love all around.
Oh, breathing and moving
oh, healing and soothing
away all the pain in life holding you down. – Sturgill Simpson, “Breakers Roar”
There’ll always be more time, at least that’s what we tell ourselves.
From putting off trying a new eatery “until next time” to a visit we could just as easily make to an old friend today, we tend to think we’ll always have more afternoons, more holidays, more visits to make. The older we get, though, the more we learn that time is the one thing that never will slow down for any of us.
The past couple of weeks have been a personal mental health whirlwind for your humble scrivener. Apart from myriad this-n-that frustrations everywhere to be found, it has seemed like this summer is the season of grieving; something normally reserved for the coldest winter chills.
While reeling from the loss of my handsome 16-year-old orange kitty boy, Wee Orangey, in April, his sister suddenly, unexpectedly passed just the week before last, as if she’d grieved herself to death. Then, last week, an old friend from college died quite unexpectedly, and the next day, a colleague was found deceased in her home.
Here we are, too, six months into a year that I swear just began. The years do move quietly, as the seasons come and go. Everything, as the late, great Townes Van Zandt sang, is “born to grow, and grown to die.”
As children grow and familiar faces become memories, we always find ourselves wishing we’d lingered a little longer in those moments. It’s a real inherent problem with the human condition.
But even in the moments that seem so ordinary, there’s something to celebrate. Just being alive and thriving.
There’s so much to do, but so little time to do it in. Case in point: I have been craving a trip to the beach, or to get out to the lake, or anywhere near/on some water for a bit. Maybe now that I am writing about it, I’ll be more apt to go forth, instead of lamenting not doing so, and reminded of such when swim trunks are discounted and fall/winter clothes are on display.
Grand adventures are not always going to provide you with some of life’s greatest treasures, nor will expensive possessions. A great deal of treasure can be found, however, in the voices of those who have travelled a bit farther down the road than we have.
My colleague who passed would have been 84 next month, and was still a fountain of advice, wit and wisdom, as well as amusing anecdotes and observances that only she could proffer. She was, also, still a vibrant force in her community.
Our elders carry entire worlds within them, and they’ve known hardships we’ve never had to face, but also joys we’ve never known, as well as lessons that can’t be found on a smartphone screen. I can recall a distant cousin at a family reunion reminding me to enjoy my grandfather’s stories, as repetitive as some of them might have been, because one day those stories would not be told. She was right.
A tale about a broken-down pickup truck or a disastrous first date might seem trite at first, but beneath those stories, when told by the voice of generations of experience, there lies a lifetime of learning and perspective-building.
Taking time to listen to our elders is more than entertainment, but a means to inherit that perspective. Older folks can offer a window into how people used to live life; of how they endured through hardships or celebrated the good times. It is through those stories that we tend to learn that the challenges we face today are not all too different from those faced by previous generations.
I can recall an often-told tale my grandfather used to deliver that involved a free afternoon, a coffee shop and far too many free cups of coffee when he was a student at the University of Texas.
He said that every time he would be free from one conversation, and just about to leave, someone else would see him and want to make conversation and buy him a cup of coffee. He wound up drinking so many coffees that he was, as he put it, “coffee-drunk.” Years later, after I’d first heard that story, I found myself in the same predicament when one old friend and a couple of coffees became another, then another, and what was intended to be an hour or so outing turned into a four-hour marathon coffee shop hang. By the time I finally walked out to my truck, my jittery countenance, spinning eyeballs and wired mind made me imagine how my grandfather must’ve felt all those years’ prior.
So, slow down when you can and put away the phone. Pull up a chair, and ask a question, and then listen to the answer. Laugh at those punchlines you might’ve heard before and bask in some wisdom and humor of lives that are fully lived.
Stories might seem fleeting in the moment they’re told, but they often become the memories we cherish the most when time has carried those storytellers away from this life.
Chris Edwards is editor of the Tyler County Booster, a sister newspaper in the Polk County Publishing Group. He can be reached at cedwards@polkcountypublishing.com.
