A Good Run

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with the seventy-something to ninety-something crowd lately, and it’s making me think about what kind of situation I might like to create for myself for when I grow up, assuming I don’t die in the next day or year or soon, which of course I might. But I might not. So I suppose even though all we have is the present, etc. etc. etc. I still want to plan for the future to some extent. There’s money, earning-saving-spending kind of stuff, but then there’s also geography and community and nest and legacy and the where-the-hell-did-those-years-go-and-what-did-I-do-with-them factor. If I get to be lucky enough to be in my seventies or nineties, it would be really cool to feel good about where the years went and what I did with them.

I was hanging with these two older friends of mine Jimmy and Dean. Jimmy is a successful businessman, still working, but long past the need for it. He likes what he does and he does it well I gather. Dean also seems pretty successful but not on the same scale. Anyway, Jimmy was saying he envied Dean for all the vacations Dean and his family had taken over the years and that he wished he’d done more of that kind of thing.

The thing is, I know Jimmy pretty well, and he would not have wanted the kind of vacations Dean probably took, camping on beaches with beetles, crashing on sofas and air mattresses, hanging out in foreign lands in inexpensive, unpredictable situations. At least I don’t see it. But what do I know, really.

Maybe I’m looking too deep into it. Maybe it’s easy to have regrets when it feels like the end is so much closer than the beginning. I wonder what that’s like, to reflect, maybe for the first time ever, at that age. To say, “What have I done here and was it worth it? Did I do my very best for me, for my family? Do I accept the choices I’ve made? Would I do it the same way if I had it to do over?”

These are Monday morning quarterbacking questions on a lifetime game, a game that might have another quarter in it anyway, which seems quite risky and potentially hurtful. I would think for the older folks I know, as much as for myself, I would want them to dump like eight or nine hundred gallons of self-acceptance and self-love on that inner conversation before embarking on it.

Did I do okay? More than okay? Did I make a contribution to other people’s happiness? Did I let people know me? Did I try to know them? Did I live my values?

So I really like hanging out with the older crew because in general they’re way more into that kind of thinking, that squeezing the juice out of life and gulping it down kind of thinking, than the younger set are. And I also like that they think of me as the younger set, which reminds me that while I might die tomorrow, I might also have a good long run ahead too. Mmmmm life like a pastry shop with an Amex Black Card. Yum. It’s good to have choices.