Like A Shadow Or A Friend

In this, my fortieth year this is the lesson than I am most fervently trying to come to grips with; that all loss gives us something. Not always what we want, not always what is right or fair, but something, and that has to be enough.

And it feels like defeat to say "It has to be enough." Like giving up on asking for more, for asking for justice and consequence. I've never been one to say that the way things are is the way they should be, and my considerable privilege has led me to feel entitled to be significant. To be heard. To be counted. To be recognized. To be successful. To be loved. To be right. To have all of the things I want. For my dreams to come true.

Having some of those dreams not come true feels like an outrage, an affront to my entitlement. A deviation from the master plan. I'm reminded of that part in the movie The Princess Bride where the kid stops his grandfather and yells "You're telling the story wrong!" The more something has cost me the more I feel certain I am due for it to reward me; and this is the necessary change with which I wrestle, to say not that "It must go my way in the end." Or "It must be worth it." But rather that sometimes it is not. Sometimes a tragedy or a loss or a mistake is simply a hole in reality. That it is reality. That reality bends for no one, including me.

It's not an epiphany that should probably come this late in life, but, that being said, I think it is probably a part of what many people term a mid-life crisis; the realization that things you always assumed would work out for you, that there was still time for, maybe won't. We want to make a last-ditch attempt to create for ourselves the life we thought we'd have before all the doors start closing. At least that's the feeling. So we have that last child, try to change careers, change marriages even, buy the dream car, build the dream house, and act in ways we haven't since we were really young just to prove to ourselves that we still can. It's not beyond us. We're not beyond relevance.

There is a balancing act in this, a quest for a graceful life, and the realization that there's so much we haven't accomplished and that time might be running out. Simultaneously we look at what we have accomplished and what we have gone through and the things we traded in pursuit of that life and, yes, there is a sense that life owes us.

And the nagging certainty that it doesn't always work like that. Not for everyone. Maybe not for me.

But maybe, hopefully, even if it doesn't give us what we want or feel is a balanced trade, it gives us something. Maybe even a chance to become greater than our narrow vision of ourselves. Maybe it gives us a chance to become someone that someone needs. Studies suggest that people regret at the end of their lives more what they didn't do, and also that the things that make us truly happy are the things we do for others. Maybe, rather than acquisition, the goal should simply be to be kind.