I recently happened upon this magnificent post by Michele Weldon, my one-time college journalism professor, two-time work colleague and all-time fellow cancer survivor.
The piece is remarkable in its poignancy and enviable in its prose. I read through it a few times–and even though Michele and I are not that close in age–her words really resonated, shocking me into a renewed sense of gratitude for my current moment in life that has lingered long after I closed the tab on her essay.
One image Michele offered hit me particularly hard in the taking-my-life-for-granted department:
I am the old lady in the lap lane … I swim in the same pool where I took my three children when they were young and never seemed to get tired; now I wonder how many laps I have left in me.
While I don’t swim, I immediately applied this haunting passage to my own life and the things I do with my kids. I could suddenly see myself walking the two blocks to the beautiful park by our house on a sunny summer Saturday, pulling my two beautiful kids behind me in the second-hand Little Tikes wagon our neighbor gifted to us. I could see myself idly checking my phone as I pushed my kids in the swings, preoccupied with thoughts about a work project and impatiently wondering when it would be nap time so I could take them back home and finally get some time to myself.
I didn’t hear the question my three-year-old daughter was trying to ask me until she raised her voice in frustration to ask it a third time. I didn’t notice that my one-year-old son was smiling up at me as he laughed with each thrilling sway of the swing. This outing had become a time-killing necessity, not a joyful bonding moment. I was embodying the kind of father I swore I’d never become–unengaged, unaware and ungrateful.
I didn’t notice the elderly man sitting on the park bench, wistfully taking in the Rockwellian scene of a father spending quality time with his two children. In this revery, I’m that guy, too. I’m the old man in the lap lane–walking ever more slowly the two blocks to the park where I spent so much time with my kids. There were times when I didn’t appreciate it enough in the moment, but there were even more times when I did. All of those times are enough to bring a tear to the old man’s eye, and to this younger man’s eye as I think about that scenario.
I am grateful for Michele’s essay as a pause button in the midst of my seemingly chaotic life to force me to realize anew that these are the good old days. This chaos is what I was created for and what I have craved.
When Theresa and I were dating, one of us said that we would look back on that time of our relationship as “a real Golden Age.” We meant this in all seriousness at the time, but we have since frequently laughed at the remark, as time has proven its arrogance and inaccuracy. Despite the temptation to view those unencumbered, carefree, dopamine-fueled days as the summit of our association, the reality is that there have been countless better times since we got married. And these are the times that I want to fully invest myself in so that when I really do become that old man on the park bench, the single tear on my cheek is full of joy and not regret.
I don’t fear the reaper of the lap lane–I know I’ll be there eventually. My greatest fear is the sin of preoccupied apathy–robbing myself of truly experiencing special moments, memories and interactions because I’m simply not present enough or too wrapped up in my work, my stress and myself to even notice the specialness anymore.
There is no denying the seasonality of life. It’s what we unknowingly signed up for. You don’t get the thrill of the rollercoaster’s drop without first taking the arduous journey up the long hill of the track. But it’s as important as it is difficult to try to admire the view as you rise, to enjoy the excitement of the descent and to bask in the afterglow when the rollercoaster is back in the station. There’s value in all of those stages, and we miss the point of the ride when we fail to recognize that.
Seven years ago yesterday, I started this blog to chronicle the approach of my fourth decade of life. My internal premise was that momentous things might happen over the course of those 10 years, and I would want a way to commemorate them for real-time analysis and future perusal.
Turns out, I bet on the right decade. Each year of my 30s seems to have featured something unexpected or new: the purchase of a condo, my first serious relationship, an engagement, the purchase of a house, a job change, a wedding, a cancer fight, and the birth of my daughter.
This year, as I marvel at how I am now entering the second half of that momentous decade and contemplate the fact that this blog’s name is no longer technically accurate, I realize that my 36th year was no exception to the “big changes” theme of my 30s.
And I feel like 36 is the year that I finally grew up.
As recently as last year, I was writing about how I didn’t feel like my advancing age was befitting of my mental, physical and emotional state. If anything could swiftly flip that switch to “adult mode,” it would be the events of the past year: the birth of my second child, an unexpected layoff, an intense job search and the start of a new job.
Over the past few months, I have found myself feeling more responsible and indispensable both personally and professionally. There are more people counting on me. There is more riding on my decisions. There is less room for selfishness. There is a greater need for collaboration. This goes for work projects, child-rearing and marriage maintaining.
I’ve always been slightly obsessed with the past and the present–heck, that’s what this blog is all about–but I find myself thinking a lot more about the future now. The unrelenting onslaught of big life changes over the last seven years has finally taught me one overarching lesson: good or bad, no stage of life lasts forever and you’re not the one in control.
That sounds trite–and probably obvious–but when I’m engaged in the daily grind, it’s easy for me to forget. My two-year-old daughter will always speak in delightfully broken English. My six-month-old son will always need to scream himself to sleep. My family and friends will always be around. My coworkers will always be my coworkers and my job will always be my job, until I decide it’s time for me to move on.
These are the lies that I’ve convinced myself of. These are the lies that punch me in the gut when unplanned change rears its ugly head, or time marches on and life evolves. Change is the truth that demands perspective, animates life and inspires gratitude.
Speaking of gratitude, I love the fact that my birthday lands right before Thanksgiving and the start of the Christmas season–a time to annually renew your spirit by taking holistic stock of where you’ve been, where you’re going and who you’re going with.
If the last year has shown me anything, it’s that the word “change” can be a synonym for “blessing.” I’m convinced that everything that happened to me in the first half of my 30s–good or bad, fun or sad–happened for a reason that was later made obvious to me or eventually will be.
There’s no doubt that the next half of this decade will be just as unscripted as the first. But if I’m doing this right, I’ll view the present with a renewed passion and the future with a grateful hope.
I ran into a friend on my commute home this evening, who told me a story about one of his friends. This simple story was an instant lesson in humility.
My friend is a lawyer, and his friend — let’s call him Alex for the sake of this recounting — is also a lawyer. But there’s something else you should know about Alex: He has cerebral palsy.
I’m sure those two facts alone are enough to make you pause and reflect on all the challenges he had to overcome to embrace that vocation — and how relatively easy your path has been to get to wherever you are right now.
Alex’s life is a daily exercise in humility. Imagine being the person who holds up the train every morning so that the ramp can be employed to get you aboard. All I do is complain that the train is late. Imagine going to lunch with a friend and having to ask that friend to physically help you to use the restroom. Sometimes I wonder if I would even have the humility to be the helpful friend.
If you struggled daily against such overwhelming physical challenges since the day you were born, how would you be different? Would you complain as much about the petty daily annoyances that often seem so difficult and important in the moment?
If it was a physical struggle to get from Point A to Point B, I think my whole perspective would have to change. The challenge of doing simple things like getting on a train or having to wonder if a new location is handicapped accessible would probably force me to embrace the beauty of the even simpler things. The sun is shining today. Someone smiled at me.
The humbling part is that I don’t have such challenges, and yet I am usually unwilling to pause and recognize the blessing of the simple or the even simpler things. The sun is shining today. I have to stand on the train, but I am blessed to be physically capable of standing on the train.
It’s always a good time to be reminded of something that Alex proves every day: Our only real limitation is our inability to embrace what we do have.
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The start of a new year is the perfect time to start shedding the fat in your life…and not just around your waist.
Do you ever think about how much time you waste on a given day? Now compound that into the wasted time of weeks, months and years. If you really examine the way you spend your days, it’s both astonishing and shameful.
How much of your time do you spend doing things that are productive and how much is just spent on distractions or relatively meaningless activities to which you have somehow assigned increasing (and unearned) value?
Guilty as charged. As I considered New Year’s resolutions, I thought a lot about self-improvement and how much time it would take to actually implement some of the things that will make me the person I want to be. My mind immediately defaulted to my usual excuse: I’m so busy. How can I possibly find the time to work these new habits into my life and routine?
A bit more soul-searching led me to realize that before I can implement any new habits, I first need to break a bad habit.
For years, I’ve been perpetuating a lie to myself that I am a good steward of my time.
Spoiler alert: I’m not.
So Job #1 is conducting an honest audit of my free time and figuring out why it disappears so easily and what I’m spending it on. Then I can move on to setting goals of how I actually want to spend it. Then I can make a realistic plan about how to accomplish those goals. So let’s give it a whirl. Hopefully it will be time well spent.
What are you doing?
It’s a basic question, but it’s worth asking if you’re trying to figure out how you’re wasting your time. For me, the answer is probably “looking at my phone.” Much as I hate to admit it, this device that can add so much to my life when used properly more often than not simply takes and takes.
In the past, I’ve made a concerted effort to use it less when I’m in the company of other people (to varying degrees of success), but I’ve never thought much about the importance of putting it down when it’s just me. With every swiped refresh of my social media feeds, I waste another five minutes that easily turns into 10 or 20, as a video or article intrigues me.
You could argue — and, oh, how I’ve tried — that some of this content is enriching. I’m catching up on the doings of old friends or reading about current events. While that is sometimes true, I’m more likely watching an Honest Trailer or reading something about a new movie that’s coming out.
This has gotten particularly monstrous when I’m about to go to bed and engage in what I mentally call one last check. I cycle through each of my drugs — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, work email, regular email, etc. — and willingly fall down whatever rabbit hole lies in my path. Now that I’ve switched to a Pixel, I’ve started swiping to the right to get my customized newsfeed of content — an AI-powered stream of stories that computer algorithms think I would be interested in. And am I ever!
When my bloodshot eyes finally begin to bother me, I realize that I have been sitting in my darkened bedroom staring at the screen for sometimes as long as 45 minutes — wasting my precious sleep time and coming away with little more than bits of trivia that I won’t even remember by the morning. (Seriously…I have no memory of what I read last night.)
A few nights ago, I was startled awake by the sound of my one-year-old daughter crying in her room. I had completed my one last check and had been asleep for about 15 minutes. I groggily picked up my phone to check out the video baby monitor and make sure she was OK. Reassured that all was well, I couldn’t help but notice a notification and spent the next 10 minutes doing one more one last check. I have a problem.
Combined with my multitudinous social media fixes and the ensuing daytime rabbit holes, this is not an insignificant amount of time being wasted almost every single day. This has to stop.
What do you want to do?
Now comes the fun part. If you had unlimited time, what would you want to do with it? It’s frustrating that I don’t realize how much time I’m wasting until after I’ve wasted it, and I don’t think about how that time could be so easily reallocated when I wistfully ponder how busy I am and how impossible it is to accomplish some of my dreams and goals.
So what am I hoping to do? Well, I’m going to start with three wishes, Aladdin-style.
I want to exercise regularly. I want to write daily. I want to (re)learn Spanish.
Exercise has been a nearly annual New Year’s or Lenten or summer commitment, er, intention of mine for as long as I can remember. Par for the course, I eventually fall off the wagon and never seem to find the time for regular exercise, even though I have plenty of time to stay caught up on the weekly melodrama of This Is Us.
Thanks to some good genes, I’ve been blessed to be able to eat pretty much whatever I want and not worry too much about significantly tipping the scale. Thanks to my advancing age and a few bad genes, spending my days sedentarily sitting in a cube is adding to both my gut and my risk of hypertension. I’m a proud Dad, but I am in no rush to continue developing a Dad Bod or missing out on a few extra years of life because of poor health choices. It’s time for some regular exercise (and some portion control!) to help whip me into shape.
Writing is a skill and a passion that I have enjoyed from a very young age. It’s also a muscle that grows weak from disuse. Writing Instagram captions and witty tweets is a far cry from taking her to sea in a Medium-length blog post. My numerousbloggingoutlets have stalled recently due to my quote-unquote lack of time and my quote-unquote writer’s block. These are both excuses that I’m hoping my new time-sensitive zeal can overcome.
Brushing up on Spanish just seems like a challenging, useful idea. It would benefit me professionally to speak the language (or at least be a bit more fluent) and it would do my brain some good to be actively learning something again. Besides, maybe my one-year-old will learn to speak it with me! I started using Duolingo last January and it lasted for about a month and a half. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it’s just that I once again excused myself from the commitment.
Stop doing what you’re doing and do what you really want to do.
Tim Urban, the genius behind Wait But Why, wrote a thought-provoking piece on how little time you actually have left with your parents and other loved ones by the time you reach your 30s. My musings here are greatly informed by what he wrote, but I am applying his sense of urgency to self-improvement rather than relationships. Tim said:
Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you — not by unconscious inertia.
I’ve realized that much of my free time is gobbled up by similar unconscious inertia — or rather a conscious decision to waste time on something that leads to unconscious inertia. I desperately need to reclaim my free time, declare my priorities and accomplish my goals.
The other aspect of all this is that I need to pursue these activities in a way that is not detrimental to my relationships and responsibilities. I am a faithful husband, father and employee. Any extracurricular self-improvement must be relegated to “me time,” and not impinge on quality time or other pressing duties of daily life.
Fortunately, I have already identified several pockets of such time in my day that could be put to more productive use: my morning and evening commutes, my lunch break at work (which I really need to take with more regularity), and any time I choose to create by staying up late or getting up early (responsibly, of course).
All that’s left is to make a realistic plan and commitment to fill this time with the activities I described above. However, I believe the success of my mission hinges more on my ability to police myself from engaging in the time-wasting activities, so I can revert to something more productive during those times. I also need to be realistic about letting myself have some mindless free time — I’m not interested in a complete fast from social media and Netflix binges.
Well, I guess I got my writing in for the day. Even if I fail at this ambitious enterprise, at least I can say that this was my most long-winded New Year’s resolution.
Here’s hoping everything else about 2018 is a whole lot leaner. And if you’re embarking on a similar journey this year, buena suerte!
Today marks three years of marriage for me, and since this blog’s niche seems to be mostly about the passage of time and marking milestones, I can’t afford not to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going.
First of all, I know that three years sounds like a fairly insignificant amount of time about which to wax poetic, but it certainly feels a lot more monumental to me. I think that’s because each year of my marriage has been defined by a huge life experience.
To review:
Year 1: Cancer!
Year 2: Pregnancy!
Year 3: Baby!
I sometimes think about how we might have reacted if at our wedding reception we had magically been shown a movie trailer providing a tantalizing glimpse of what the next three years would hold. Would we have run screaming out of the ballroom? Would we have been a little more reflective whilst doing The Wobble on the dance floor? Would we have wondered where the Candid Camera was hidden?
Regardless of our imagined reactions to a hypothetical scenario, we still would have been forced to do exactly what we did—live through it all and rely on each other every day.
Marriage is not a movie trailer. It is not defined by the big moments and the dramatic reveals. A more realistic trailer would show how mundane married life really is, even when you’re dealing with an admittedly outsized number of intense life events over a short period of time.
The true-to-life trailer would have Oscar-worthy scenes of me texting Theresa about what time the train will get me home from work and Theresa replying to ask about my dinner preferences. It would feature suspenseful scenes of Theresa finding out that we somehow owe money on our income taxes and me desperately trying to finish mowing the last few rows of my lawn before the bag fills up. Will he make it?!
My point is that marriage—even a quote-un-quote exciting marriage like mine—is far less action-packed than it seems like it will be. It’s mostly about just going through your daily life, but with the added complexity of going through it with a partner.
That complexity is the key to the whole thing. If you’ve found the kind of partner with whom you would happily watch paint dry, the day-to-day “drudgery” can be pretty darn fun. Big stuff like getting through cancer, going through pregnancy and raising a baby will be similarly enjoyable (OK, maybe some more enjoyable than others) because you have entered into a partnership that enhances your life and makes the mundane moments manageable and the important moments magical.
I’m filing jointly now—in taxes and everything else.
But marriage is a process, not a proclamation, and there’s no guarantee that we’re always making things manageable or magical for each other. These three years have taught me two main lessons about how to be the loving, selfless husband that I want to be: how far I’ve come from who I was when I was single and how far I still have to go.
Sometimes it’s the day-to-day disagreements that stack up to the point where you’re tripping over each other as you try to walk around them. Other times it’s a seemingly fundamental fight that in the moment makes you wonder how you’ll ever come back together on the issue.
Thankfully, the balms of heartfelt apology, authentic forgiveness and eventual laughter have soothed wounds both big and small. We agree that the partnership is the best thing we have going—and that our partner’s influence is helping us to become the people we are meant to be.
As parenthood became the focus in Year 3, the centrality of our partnership became more complex and crucial than it had been during disease or pregnancy. We brought a new life into the world together—and introduced a host of new joys, sorrows, worries and wonders with which to grapple. With a third member added to our party, we found more magical moments to enjoy together and more opportunities for the marital rubber to hit the road. Our beautiful daughter required us to individually push ourselves to our limits of time, energy, and enthusiasm, while also requiring us to support each other and protect our partnership more than ever.
Even with our diverse experiences in the first two years of marriage, it was still hard. It remains hard. But as Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own, it’s supposed to be hard. The hard is what makes it great. And the last three years of my life have been a whole lot better than great.
I try not to let a day pass without being grateful that Theresa and I found each other and for the innumerable blessings that have flowed into my life by hitching my wagon to her star. To have lived through and learned so much by her side in just three short years of marriage makes me wonder what mundane and momentous experiences await when three years becomes 30 and 30 becomes 50. Is there a movie trailer for that?
Rounding 30 