Going to a wedding is a good reminder of the stages of life that God has gifted us with. My oldest daughter Gina and her husband Laszlo recently gave me a grandchild, Emma. It feels like only yesterday that Gina was a baby and when Julie and I were getting married, but life has continued to move forward. I'm fortunate to have always appreciated all the phases of my life.
I'm convinced God limited our time at each phase of our lives so we wouldn't get bored, but unfortunately, some people seem to skip over their lives looking forward to some ideal time. As Voltaire wrote in "Candide," however, we truly do "live in the best of all possible worlds."
I hope you are taking time to enjoy every day. Don't let the news convince you that you are doomed. My mother was raised in a house without indoor plumbing and with only rudimentary electricity. There wasn't a television, because TV was a new invention. The first TV station started at the time of her birth, and by the time she was 8, there were only 200 television sets in the world. Widespread viewership and color TV were still decades away. Of course, there were no video recorders, computers, cell phones or iPods. Mom's father was a farmer, school bus driver, mailman and horse trader. To say he was busy making a living was an understatement, but he always had time to put my Mom on his shoulders and sing a song early in the morning, long before the sun came up, before taking her on his school bus run around the rural county. My mom never felt deprived, and if you ever met her, you know she was an intrisically happy person.
Psychologist Viktor Frankl did her one better. He managed to find sanity and happiness in a Nazi concentration camp. The existentialist philosophy he developed, based on the premise that no matter what the circumstance, we always maintain the ultimate freedom of controlling our thoughts, made him famous when World War II ended.
It is much easier to be happy in the USA today, when we have so much personal freedom to choose our own lives. I heard one of my favorite songs from when I was in college the other day. Back when I was young and knew everything, I appreciated the brilliant songwriting and musicianship of Elton John's "Levon." The words were about some immigrant and vaguely sad, but nothing I really thought too much about, but when I heard the song a couple of days ago, I realized it is a song about my grandparents, my parents, Julie and me, my children and my grandchildren. We all have wonderful aspirations for our lives, and want to "take a balloon and go sailing."
Why not choose to take a cruise? It's within your grasp right now. Dreams still come true.
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