Embracing the Suck

Ann asked me the other day why I always walk into the bedroom closet to put on a pair of jeans. I told her, honestly, it’s because the closet is carpeted and if I fall on my ass, I’m falling on soft carpet and not ceramic tile. It’s just one of those little concessions I’ve started making since I’m growing older. I once asked a friend who’d spent a career in the Special Forces community, what he thought looking back on it. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Eh, some of it sucked, but you just had to learn to embrace the suck…” I think that’s also a brief lesson on aging. We live our lives like chapters in a book, a series of 10-year chapters, each decade a new chapter. Think about it, being a little kid sucks, you’ve got a lot of great ideas, nobody listens, no is the answer to everything, and you’re surrounded by hall monitors, parents, teachers, older siblings, all woofing at you. You spend your teenage years trying to be James Dean and doing a lot of stupid shit, usually involving cars and girls. In your 20’s, it’s college and the military. You smoke weed, drink beer and do more stupid shit, but you have a better car, more money and you’re pretty sure you are James Dean. You spend your 30’s denying or covering up everything you did in your 20’s. The 40’s is the educational decade, you learn a lot of new words- alimony, child support, downsizing, stock market crash, DUI, heart attack. In your 50’s, you spend a lot of time cleaning up your 40’s and thinking about regrets and retirement. After 60, physically and mentally, life begins to change, it’s a little like Jimmy Buffet said, “…living and dying in three quarter time…” Yeah, now, we may limp, shuffle and use the handrails, but we were a cool generation, we were always up to something. We protested the Viet Nam War, and we fought the Viet Nam War. We saw the marches and the changes for civil rights, the birth of the electronic age and saw a man walk on the moon. We left home in VW vans, heading to San Francisco and Haight Ashbury. Our generation gave the world Woodstock, Motown, Boz Scaggs, the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan—it’s like Bob Dylan said, “…people today are living off the scraps of the 60’s. They are still being passed around, the music and the ideas…” We’ve fought the wars, done the work, but now we’re aging, it's time to kick back and enjoy ourselves. Sure, there’s a dicey side to getting old, we have aches, pains and never pass up an available bathroom but like my friend said, learn to embrace the suck. On the positive side you’re free, retired, pensioned off, answerable only to you, so do some of those things you’ve always wanted to do- the more off-the-wall the better. Travel, go see some of those places you’ve always wanted to see, you’ll meet nice people along the way. Spend serious time with your hobbies now that work doesn’t get in the way. Meet friends for drinks, lunch or dinner and take your time, stay awhile, nobody has to get back to work. Don’t resign from life, stay in touch with what’s going on in the world, but watch the news with a jaundiced eye; fear and dire predictions make money for media corporations. Accept the fact that we don’t run the world anymore, we turned that job over to a new generation and they’re the decision makers, now. We taught, counseled, and coached them and they paid attention at least 10% of the time, so it’ll hopefully work out. We’re going into the last chapter in our book, and nobody knows what’s on the other side. Personally, the one hope I have is that when I’m ready to cash in my chips and see what’s on the other side, the last voice I’ll hear is Ann’s….