When I had my 70th birthday, I threw myself a "Celebration of Decrepitude" because I thought I'd earned it. 70 years is a vast amount of time in people years. In those decades there have been complex, daunting situations I couldn't escape from. No choice. I just had to live through them. At no time in the past had I had any instructions for how to handle such situations.
When my dad stepped out onto the back steps of his and my mother's house after the tornado and saw that the house next door where my mother and her mother had been and saw that it was completely gone, he said, "I just sat down on the steps and waited for someone to come and tell me what to do. I had never experienced anything or read anything that would tell me what to do in this situation."
I'm glad he had the option to sit and wait for instructions. In my situations, there were other people who depended on me and I just had to keep moving in some direction even though I had no idea what to do. So...trial and error. Lots of error.
However, eventually I fell into luck or God and found people or they found me that could teach me how to do situations.
When I turned 70 5 and 1/2 years ago I realized that it might be an idea with meaning to begin writing down the stuff I've learned. I began to write a memoir. I started writing about those lessons in my blog.
Then a year or so ago I realized that everybody 70 and over has lessons they've learned that could be shared. I mentioned to a couple of people whose stories I thought would be good ones that I was available to help them write them. They turned me down. So I gave up for awhile. But now I'm feeling very stubborn about it. I want to ghost write a series of stories for a book. Watch out. When I'm being very stubborn, I'm not going to relent.
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