Everything Will Be Okay
Really, It Will Be
I read a couple of excellent newsletters the other day on Substack.
One, by Kirsten Powers, dealt with how she and her husband have decided to leave the United States and move to Italy to live.
Why? Kirsten cites a number of reasons and as she worked her way down her list, I was struck by how closely her “issues” resembled mine (confirmation, yet again, that we are all alike, no matter our race, creed, colour or background).
In short, her reason for leaving the U.S. is to find a better quality of life.
She writes that she is fed up with living under daily pressure: to earn enough for basic needs, to hustle and rush to “crush” one’s goals, to work one’s ass off to “make it” but, over all of that, the realization that no matter how hard you work, one illness can bankrupt you under the U.S. healthcare system.
As a Canadian, I can say that for all the shortcomings of our own healthcare access, the fact it is taxpayer funded means that no one is saddled with massive medical debt in this country. And that’s critically important when you are retired and on a fixed income.
Still, if you want to buy a house, you need a gargantuan downpayment followed by an enormous monthly mortgage payment because housing is so expensive here, as it is in the U.S. And if you want to rent, you’re still going to have to fork out a couple of grand a month for anything decent.
What Kirsten was driving at was this: if you don’t want stress to kill you as you work for your goals, then it seems the only alternative is to toss aside your dreams, forget owning a home, accept that a basement apartment is what fits your budget and just plain give up the idea of what you think will make you happy. Or you can move to another country.
What’s so sad about this notion that we have to “strive to have” is that nothing material gives genuine long-term satisfaction. We simply end up striving to have something else.
Quantity replaces quality.
Even though I empathized with Kirsten Powers’ reasons for leaving her home country, when I read Ann Richardson’s newsletter, “The Granny Who Stands on her Head,” the needle on my mood gauge began to shift from glum to uplifted.
What we want to accomplish at The Art 2 Aging is to provide content that gives them hope as they age; that allows them to see that it’s not nearly over yet and that there’s plenty of good living left to live.
Ann’s post, “18 or 82: Which Would You Choose?”, posed an intriguing question: if you could, which age would you choose? By the way, Ann is 82 and she cautioned that one couldn’t choose 18 when you were so much older because that would be cheating.
“You can’t be 18 with any of the knowledge that you have gained since that age…”, she explains.
Regardless, she went on to argue for choosing 18 with everything it holds like the promise of the future, vigour, marriage, health, career, etc., and I thought, “wait a second, Ann, you’re not supposed to think like that! You should face your age with acceptance!”
And just when I was about to exit her newsletter in disappointment, she wrote, “ …For me, the answer is not the obvious one. I love being my age. It helps that I am healthy and do everything I can to keep it that way. I eat well, I exercise and generally manage to get my beauty sleep.”
She goes on to state, “there are so many benefits to being older that it is a wonder that people aren’t out there singing them in the street. We ‘old people’ have the confidence that comes with age…”
Overall, I say well done, Ann! I know there are those older individuals reading this who will question the bit about having confidence that comes with age; it could easily go the other way but it’s at that point where we have access to our power as human beings.
We get to decide what age means. In fact, let’s not stop there. We get to decide what life means.
I remember taking a personal development course in Toronto in 1998 through Landmark Education (if you remember Werner Erhard, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Of course, you have to be over 60…). It was a powerful course whose principles for living a powerful life have stayed with me to this day.
Just before the lunch break on the final day, the course leader told us that, after lunch, “I’ll tell you what the meaning of life is.”
Now we’re getting to it, I thought excitedly.
We hustled back from our break with great anticipation. Finally, someone was going to unlock the secret to life.
And here’s what the instructor said: LIFE IS EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS. AND IT’S EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS THAT IT’S EMPTY AND MEANINGLESS.
You could almost hear the excited, positive energy hiss away like air from a punctured tire to be replaced by a lot of angry, negative energy. We’d been had!
He went on to break down the riddle and it amounts to this great truth: the only meaning life holds is the one each of us gives it. Life is completely neutral until we assign meaning to it. Not just overall meaning, either, but the meaning we automatically give to daily incidents, the judgments we automatically lay on complete strangers we encounter – quite literally, we give everyone and everything a meaning, positive or negative.
At Landmark, they referred to humans as “meaning assigning machines.” I love that.
So, for Kirsten Powers, the meaning she desperately – and rightly – wants to give her life is one that we all want to give to our own lives, the one that says life can be very, very good and if we all embrace that meaning, each of our lives will fill with joy, purpose, and love.
And that’s Ann Richardson’s point. Find happiness where you are and everything else will be okay. Really.