You're Too Old to Be Bitter and Angry About Life: Reflections on Being Grateful

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

On the eve of another over-the-top Western holiday season, let’s take stock

Pissed that life didn’t turn out the way you wanted?

Angry that you ended up alone/childless/not exactly Tony Stark?

Bitter that you didn’t become that movie star/inventor/beloved Influencer?

The good news is that you’re in excellent company.

That would be most of us. Most assuredly it’s me, alone, childless, not exactly Tony Stark, not a movie star or inventor and thank the heavens, most assuredly NOT an influencer. Not much of anything, really, not in the great scheme of things.

But grateful. Not bitter or angry. Hardly. Shit, after my adventure career I am damned lucky to be alive, much less upright and functioning.

Okay, hardly functioning. Still.

Every Thanksgiving we are reminded to give thanks, as though we can somehow be forced to acknowledge our gratitude for all life’s myriad gifts into one day of stuffing the stuffing into our guts.

For most of us that gratitude might be mumbled during grace, if at all, then we load up.

I’m learning to say thanks every single day for all of it, including the shit sandwiches. There’s plenty of research behind that choice, and it bolsters the argument to give a thumbs-up to bad news as well.

By about mid-life, there is likely to have been plenty of bad news. Maybe we didn’t get to that college we wanted, maybe an injury kept us from an athletic career. Perhaps another guy got the girl of your dreams.

Perhaps coming out to your parents cost you your family. Job. Everything, in fact.

Perhaps an accident or disease left you crippled.

Life may have ripped you off in a thousand ways, or at least that’s how you see it.

By fifty we’ve lost people. Some of you have lost children. Others, siblings. All of us have lost loves, opportunities and perhaps are still bashing ourselves for not taking that Big Chance when it appeared on our front door.

Who knew, right? We always believe there will be other days.

Especially while the rest of our lives spreads ahead like endless North Dakotan prairie to the end of time.

There’s a terrific scene out of Field of Dreams, delivered by the rookie-turned doctor Moonlight Graham, played by Burt Lancaster:

This scene is profoundly important to those of us who have not yet grieved for what might have been. That grief is an essential payment for allowing us to move to the next thing.

Holding grief is part of life. Learning to live with having it inform us for the rest of days is also part of what teaches gratitude.

If you’re a football buff, Dan Marino believed there'd always be another Super Bowl. Until there wasn’t. Robert Griffin III was All That and a bag of chips, until he wasn’t.

For most of us there is always another day. Until there isn’t.

Photo by Jordan Steranka on Unsplash

Today I am at a smallish town on the Central Oregon coast where I am about to do some reps with my travel set of fifteens.

For the first time in more than a year I can walk, ride a bike, ride horses again, work out regularly with both hands. Do pushups, pullups, stride without a scooter, walk without a walker, grasp without a hand brace.

I am not All That. But I sure as hell am grateful. I can’t hike big mountains (yet) and maybe I can’t go back to kayaking (yet) but I am ambulatory. Strength is rebounding fast.

I get to ask what I want to do next. What an amazing, intimidating, utterly terrifying question at seventy. What a gift to ask such a thing.

Sometimes you learn to be incredibly thankful for what’s really important.

Like life, for one thing. The possibility of another day, another dawn, another shot at something else. Even if all that means is changing our minds, which is the hardest work of all. We can do that at any point.

For too many of us, midlife and beyond are when we start staring backwards at coulda, shoulda woulda.

I have known one man his entire life, since he was an adolescent. That now 73-year-old son of an abusive drunk spent his entire life, his ENTIRE life, bitching that he could have made the Major Leagues but for his father. That’s five-plus decades of looking backwards, blaming, bitter.

He was never able to redirect, using all that energy to focus on coulda shoulda woulda, instead of what was in front of him. Blame made him blind.

My father wanted to be an actor. He lived on Broadway in the Roaring Twenties with three other poor roommates. Those roommates would head to Hollywood. Dad said that movies were a passing fancy.

Dad’s “poor roommates” were Jimmy Stewart, Burgess Meredith and Henry Fonda.

Not making that up.

Years later he was working in radio at the CBS station WMAL in Washington D.C. He was the (now-Commodores’) first TV announcer. He started the first courses in radio at American University, too.

I still have that brochure. It all looked so promising. Dad was in his forties, still a vital, handsome guy with a milk chocolate voice and a Cornell education.

David Brinkley was a copy boy when my dad was there. Dad walked away, sure that a bum ear meant he had no future in television.

I don’t think my father ever recovered from those choices. He ended up smoking and drinking his health away, never speaking of these events. I learned about them from old family friends.

I was astonished. But it explained a lot.

All of us suffer terrible losses. War, suicide, natural disasters, rip our lives apart.

Can we be grateful for those as well? Or do we want to blame an angry God for waking up that morning with the sole purpose of ruining our lives?

There are events which sear us right to the soul. From which parts of us never recover. There’s always that. It’s a rare life indeed which is unscathed.

Yet some of the very people who suffer the most also seem to be able to gain an even greater appreciation for what they have (life, friends, family, another day) and who they are, as they are, where life has put them.

They find more meaning in each day, rather than feel the time as a burden to carry.

I’ve heard some people sneer that such folks are “just lucky” that they can find their way through tragedy.

There’s nothing lucky about it.

They bear the scars. Many wounds never heal. In so many ways, the wounds we bear, bear witness to the new sun glancing off the waves, as I did today.

You and I are WAY Too Old to carry bitterness and blame into our final years.

Yesterday I spent the holiday with friends. That took five hours of driving through some of Oregon’s prettiest territory. Towards the end of the day, dusk teased bright gold rays through the branches as I wound my way towards Highway 18 West towards Lincoln City.

Every so often we are given moments of such beauty and grace that it’s almost too much. I slowed down, watching the light play through the forests.

I am so grateful to see such things. To bear witness to such beauty. I wanted to cry.

Did cry.

I’m learning to see each day as THE day. For there may not be other days.

Along with millions of others, I sit on the Cascadia earthquake fault. We are overdue for a 9.5. A go bag in the face of that kind of destructive power is like flipping a bird at an oncoming tsunami wave.

Like death, not if. When.

Yes, I’m grateful for the wounds, the lost dreams, the solo journey. Didn’t sign up knowingly for the solo part of it.

I did sign up for life. Life pulls all manner of things out of its pockets along the way.

The fact that I can’t wait to see what comes next is borne on the shoulders of the pain and losses already lived.

There’s much to be grateful for.

It begins with just waking up.

Let’s play.

Photo by Daniel Joshua on Unsplash

Warm thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. I hope you got value. If so, kindly consider

If someone you know is struggling with Why Me? and we all do at some point, please also consider

Thank you for reading my thoughts.