May 3, 2007

• Featured Grownups Topic Post

  Featured Grownups Topic Post: "If I knew then what I know now"

  
  

  May topic 1 of 2, 2007

  
  

  From the Featured Grownups site: "I'm not asking how you would change your life ... I want to know about an event or events that can only be experienced by the fact that we all learn from experience...Rember - it can be funny, silly, serious, sentimental, real, fantasy... it's only what you make it!"

  
  

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  "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.".........Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"

  
  

  I've used this quote before as a preface to one of my blog entries and it immediately sprang to mind when I read the first Featured Grownups topic for May. Do I possess more or less knowledge, more or less savvy, more or less insight, than I did at any time in my youth? In retrospect, perhaps more, perhaps less. In an early poem of mine, I proclaimed: "I have felt all the feelings without living all the life". Now I peruse the older poems and I read my own young words, and I realize that perhaps I did possess a lot of ideas, felt a lot of emotions, and saw many visions concerning what life had in store for both me and the world. Now that I've lived over half a century, I am wont to enjoy the days, weeks, and years of my "progressive youth" a little better, where in my "actual youth" I worried possibly far too much about "the future."

  
  

  Who hasn't pondered how life would have been if they had foreknowledge of how certain events would have turned out? Who hasn't looked through the clear bright lenses of hindsight and ascertained that certain decisions would have been better off not being made, or certain exits off the freeway of circumstance would have been better off having been passed.

  
  

  Since I have just entered the "year of death" of my father, his life having been snuffed at the age of 54, the age which has just turned it's page on me, I am pondering deeply the final years of my parents' lives. I never stop pondering these facts, as they impacted my succeeding life greatly. Three things I would have done differently in that time, now having access to a little more information and wisdom after having lived a little more life, are these, and I know I have written about these decisions, and their consequences in the past.

  
  

  One. I would never have abandoned my mother, if I would have known how seriously the decision would haunt me in later life. Surely if I were "feeling all the feelings" as I wrote in the early poem, then I should have seen this one coming back in 1974. As I have confessed in countless blog entries, I "beat myself up" continually over having abandoned my mother on her death bed, a full two years before she died. Upon relating the sorrowful news to Mother that her husband had died, accompanied by my siblings in her hospital room, where she was hooked up to dialysis and couldn't move a muscle as a result of her crippling and debilitating bi lateral stroke, I left the room for the last time, proclaiming in my mind that Mother, too, had passed from existence. The "Mother" I knew, anyway. This person in the bed was not my Mother. She hardly even looked the same. The twinkle in her eye was gone, and her remembered smile had ceased to appear since the stroke. She couldn't even communicate her grief at Father's passing, but I'm sure if I were to "go back' and look closely, I would be able to see that she was indeed cognizant, and even though she didn't "show" feelings or express realizations, she did know what had transpired, and by not returning to her bedside for the next two years, prior to her final death, which I have always maintained was "from a broken heart", I turned my back, and abandoned my own Mother. I'm sure she has forgiven me. I have since purged my feelings of "unfinished business", and even here on my blog, when mentioning this callous decision of  my 21 year old self, my readers have consoled me and told me they are sure that Mother's Spirit forgave me long ago.

  
  

  Two. We had to sell the family home in order to be able to obtain the MediCare my Mother needed to stay in the rest home after she was released from the hospital. I should have bought the house myself, and I'm now pretty upset that neither the lawyer who was monitoring the estate business after my Father's death, nor the real estate agent who took care of the sale, even mentioned this option to me. I had moved out of the house immediately after my Father died, and I lived in a rented apartment. The house sold for what seems now like an incredibly low price of $30,000.00 back in 1974. It is probably worth over half a million by now.

  
  

  Three: I should have finished school. People are always telling me I should "go back to school", but I never will. I should have graduated from the University of Southern California in June of 1974.  In late 1973, and throughout 1974, I began dropping out of one class after another as more and more pressure was put on our family's life because of my mother's condition. She had the first stroke in 1972. The bilateral stroke was in 1973. We visited her in the hospital as much as we could, and I was holding down a full time job in retail at the time. I wasn't just a salesman, but a department manager, and I found that schoolwork was the easiest thing to drop during that time. When I completely dropped out, I only had 16 units before I would have received my Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. I had already completed my English Lit requirements, and only had one science class and three electives, plus a thesis to write, before full graduation. My mind was not on my studies, however, and as I have written before, other friends of mine who had completed their education studies were finding it difficult to get good teaching jobs, and when they did, they were making less money than I was in retail management. If I had a "do over" I would attempt to finish school.

  
  

  Are these regrets? I really don't think so. Lost opportunities? Mayhap so, and mayhap not. Life is a journey with many paths, exits, and hidden opportunity. If we could all take a spin in a time machine that would take us back to the points in life we wish we would change, we might find that the "butterfly effect" of happenstance and coincidence might make the wrong right, and the missed opportunity appear, but what dominoes fell as a result of any change, might indeed change something else for the worse.

  
  

  It has always been my belief, "feeling all the feelings" before having lived the life, and after having lived some of the life, and experienced more feelings, that it is better we savor our choices, and have a little but not a grieving amount of regret for incorrect choices. We shouldn't want to change the past. The instructions for this blogpost make that clear. "I'm not asking how you would change your life" I'm proposing that we think about our "roads not taken", and that we ponder what other roads might exist on the journey we are taking, but we should use these thoughts to make things better for ourselves in the future, and we should reap what we sow, and relish the sustenance it provides, the "food for thought" we imbibe.

  
  

  I worried far too much before I had anything to worry about. When circumstances caused me to worry, I wanted to forget about them and concentrate on other matters. Now, in retrospect, each pebble on the beach of experience counts when you look at them individually, but wnen amassed they simply look like a lot of rocks among the sand. While walking along the shore, let's pick up each rock as we pass, and contemplate it's importance, and then throw it away and continue our stroll to eternity.

  • 10:17 am
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