Mid-Life Crisis
My wife asked me when I started this whether or not I was going through a mid-life crisis. I don’t know what to say to that. There’s a lot going on in my life. My daughter is getting married this fall. It’s going to be a challenge, because it will be a very unorthodox wedding. I’m still reflecting on my life so far. I turned 50 on November 17, 2005. 50 isn’t really that bad of an age to be, although I tend to think more about mortality and one’s legacy.
I know that I have started placing higher value on the relationships with the people around me than I used to. I wrestle with the fact that for so long, my Dad wasn’t there for me and wasn’t there for my wife and my kids. I don’t want to follow down that path and I don’t believe that I have followed down that path. I’ve made a fair amount of mistakes in my life, as we all have, but I try not to dwell on them.
Here’s a scary thought: one hundred years after we’re dead, there won’t be anyone around that remembers us as individual people. We might have our descendents retelling stories about us or we might have our descendents researching our lives. However, the descendants that survive us that far down the road will not have been alive when we were alive. They won't have really known us. The things that we produce in our lives might be remembered, but they’ll just be fragments of our lives that will diminish over time.
Our lasting legacy will be the life that we live now and the ways that it affects the people around us. Live your life as a selfish asshole and see how many people fondly remember you after you’re gone. Live you life treating people the way that you want to be treated and you might just be remembered the right way. Ultimately it will be only the rippled waves that you create in your life that will resonate beyond you. It’s better to be creating the good waves.
If you want to receive, then you had better learn to give. You know, you might even find out that giving becomes its own reward. However, when you become so enamored with yourself that all you are interested in doing is just getting the stuff that you believe you deserve, then you'll end up being stuck with other similar selfish people and wandering why life keeps seeming to pass you by.
I’ve generally lived with this philosophy. I like teaching other people what I know. I like helping people. I’ve seen relatives trying to buy their way into other people’s hearts. It never works. You can’t make people like you, you can only be a likeable person and hope that it’s well received.
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