A friend of mine died more than a year ago, but I was too busy to notice. We worked together for a while, stayed in touch over the years, saw each other every six months or so, and then the visits became less frequent. We moved into the city, he and his wife moved farther into the suburbs, we’d find opportunities to meet in the middle somewhere, but neither of us pursued the connection with the utmost zeal. Then he took ill, an increasingly common development as my friends and I get older. I went out to visit, as he couldn’t drive anymore, and we had a couples dinner or two, but that was clearly a long, long time ago. I knew he was getting worse, I wrote myself a note to check in on him, and then I made another note and another. I never actually checked in, but I was very diligent about writing new notes. And one day, it was too late. Not that I knew about it, since I was so busy writing reminder notes. I thought about the challenges his wife was facing, I thought about his descent into a hellish disease, I thought about the small support a check-in call might offer. But there’s a huge difference between thinking and doing and I didn't bridge the gap. Since the days when everyone lived in the same cave and spoke the same five words, it has never been easier to stay in touch than it is today. We can Zoom or conference, text or email, make a phone call or jump in a ride-share 24/7. And yet, it seems we are more distanced in many ways, unable to find the time or the drive to connect. Sometimes we spend more time making the plans than we actually spend together. Sometimes, we spend more time writing reminders to ourselves than we’d need to make the damned call. There’s always tomorrow, until there isn’t. In this case, nearly 600 tomorrows have elapsed since the last one that might have mattered. I have no idea what I would have said on the call I never made. People sometimes say it’s important to say goodbye, but that always seems more of a benefit to the person who’s staying than for the one about to depart. The visitor checks a box, while the patient knows they will never hear from their contact for as long as they live. I’ve done the last-goodbye visit more than once and I’ve always felt it was the right thing to do in the specific circumstances with the specific people. Usually, I try to avoid any indication that I don’t expect to return, even if we both know it’s the final conversation. This time was different, because I didn’t bother at all. Now I’m wondering if I should do anything or let it lie. Should I call his widow and express condolences, or does my lengthy absence make things worse? “Yes, I ignored you and your husband, my friend, for so long that he died more than a year ago and I never even noticed, but isn’t it great that I’m noticing now?” Does it reopen a wound to remind her of the people who didn’t show up when it mattered? Am I calling to help her or just to assuage my own guilt? Or, does any expression of sympathy help with the healing, even if it comes much too late from a pretty crappy friend? Gotta ponder that for a while. Maybe I’ll write myself a note.
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I’ll really miss those nipples. The sippy cups? Not so much. I finally got around to clearing some old junk from the kitchen cabinets, which meant it was finally time to toss the relics of infancy and toddlerhood. The grandkids are older now and they’ve mastered the arts of fine dining, or at least the use of flatware. We’ve even made the last transition from those 50-pound car seats that can withstand both crashes and nuclear blasts, downshifting to the much lighter and, probably deadlier, boosters they can secure on their own. It’s a rite of passage for each of them, of course, but it’s also another passage for me, one of those moments in life that announces the closing of a door that is almost certainly not going to open again. I love it when they announce that they can handle some task on their own and no longer need any assistance, with toilet training very high on that list, but it’s also another notch in my own timeline, a milestone on that other path. Almost all the time, I take it in stride. I’m energized by their joy, their growth, their discoveries and achievements, and I really feel younger when I get a chance to join them on their much newer journey. There's almost never any melancholy as I give away their childish things, whether it’s toys or clothes or books or car seats. But the nipples are somehow more difficult, the symbol of a moment that is so precious, so overwhelming, that it's almost sacred. Because I have never been as connected to another human being, never as absorbed in the miracle of life, never as overwhelmed by the possibilities of the future, as when I have bottle-fed an infant. I have never had someone look into my eyes as steadily and without affect, an eternal moment without distraction. I have never been as separated from the world, existing in a space where nothing else exists, as when I have lost myself in their gaze, and they in mine. Maybe I’m overly romantic about it, assigning a meaning and a connection that’s far beyond reality. Maybe they were just staring at this big lump at the other end of the bottle and worrying that I’d leave before they’d had enough to eat, or that I would fall over and crush them. Maybe they were wishing they knew how to speak so they could tell me I was doing it wrong. But they couldn’t speak, so I get to be the one telling this story and I’m focusing on the sacred moments. Life is filled with all kinds of great experiences, joyful times, powerful moments when there is nothing but the now, the connection, the infinite measure of a priceless memory. I’m not likely to have this experience again, so this memory needs to survive as long as I do. Even without the nipples, I’m pretty sure it will. If I ever have an experience like this again, I’ll let you know, but only if you click here to subscribe. We’ll all be happier when AI eats our homework and we should all be nervous about liberals on the warpath, along with other thoughts you won’t be able to unsee this week… Maybe just this once. The driver who picked us up at the airport is very excited about his future. He’s lost 61 pounds so far on Ozempic, which is good for his diabetes and also good for walking on his new knee. He feels better and he looks better, as proven by the photo he showed us, and life is great. As soon as he gets the second knee replaced, he plans to get back to traveling and enjoying his rediscovered mobility. Next stop, he says, is Chicago, for deep dish pizza. Clearly, all that hard work and suffering deserves an award. An eighth deadly sin! I see that former Trump fixer Michael Cohen admitted to submitting an AI-generated court filing included a slew of fake citations, and I wasn’t surprised. Nobody checks their work anymore and nobody ever questions anything that comes out of a digital device. GIGO is the one immutable law of computing, but we’re about to see a zillion disasters as people sign off on AI documents they’ve never read and action plans they’ve never considered. Well beyond pride and envy and greed, sloth is the deadliest of sins. Well, it's not gonna kill me, maybe. Speaking of sloth, a friend and I were commiserating about how hard it is to get anyone to revisit their assumptions about anything. This is a big surprise to nobody, of course. We give things a glance, make up our minds and move on, devoting our energies to more important matters like telling online strangers how to live their lives. I’d make light of it, but it’s survival instinct at work. We decide something isn’t a threat, so we stop paying attention. Owning themselves. I was at a dinner the other night with a bunch of people who were complaining about immigration. Too many people are coming in, we have no systems in place to handle the surge, the immigrants have no interest in assimilating, they should turn around and go home, etc. Did I mention most of these people are liberals? Never means never. There are a couple of companies that keep sending me emails with all kinds of incredible offers and they refuse to stop. I’ve hit unsubscribe a million times and sometimes send them to the spam folder, but they keep sending new messages from a seemingly unending array of email addresses that I haven’t blocked yet. And I can’t help but wonder, what’s the point? It’s not like I’m suddenly going to forget the carpal tunnel I developed in my fruitless efforts to block them. What genius in the marketing department decided it was a good idea to recruit people to the Never, Ever, Ever, Ever list? Okay Genzer. It was once a mark of aging to start sentences with, “When I was your age,” but the newest batch of oldsters are people who begin a recollection with, “Back in the day…” Gen Z is rolling its eyes at you, Millennials, and I’m schadenfreuding like crazy. Would we notice? Speaking of Gen Z, I’m a little bit nervous now that they’re old enough to run for Congress. With their work ethic, it’ll be nothing but recesses and live-texting from hearings and absolutely zero work getting done. On second thought… She aged since then. Speaking of second thoughts, I really regret responding to those clickbait stories on Facebook last year. Now my feed is nothing but hilarious stories about texts gone wrong and invitations to ogle women who have been dead for 50 years. Even worse, I’m not getting any videos of cats playing the piano. Maybe I should get into that whole clickbait thing by promising nude photos of cats playing the piano instead of a Dad Writes subscription if you click here. Yes, the best wine is the one I’m drinking now and the best day is the one I’m living now and the best movie ever is the one I’m watching now, but the best time of my life is already long past. Of course, pretty much everything in my life is long past, even if I can still buy green bananas. I was reminiscing the other day and it occurred to me that the best years of our lives go by without us realizing we’re at our apex. We’re too busy with the day-to-day, the striving, the deadlines and detritus, so we miss the moments we should savor the most. I’m enjoying my life now, looking forward to what comes next, planning for the future, even as I look over my shoulder every so often for the Reaper’s hoodie…and all is right with the world, more or less. I wouldn’t want to go back and relive my childhood or high school or college or pretty much any other time of life…but there is one period I think I’d leap through time to experience all over again and that’s my 40s. It goes without saying that this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I’ll say it anyway to avoid hate mail and legal action. For a huge number of us, especially the people who decide to raise kids, the fifth decade is the absolute best and for many reasons:
Don’t panic if you’ve hit 50 and you forgot to savor the past ten years. There’s plenty to look forward to and no urgent need to jump off the roof. If you’re still in your 20s or 30s, though, make a note to savor every moment when your golden decade arrives. Trust me, it will be gone in a blink. Yeah, you thought the best days were when you got your first real six-string, but you were wrong. Feel free to argue, though, right after clicking here to subscribe. Quotidian miracles, the Ticketmaster Tax, and the inflation that wasn’t are all on our list of gripes this week. And how are you doing?
A woman I mentored a while ago caught me up on her life recently and she offered an insight that everyone should gain at some point along the journey. Smart woman, hard-working, energetic, and, as is the case with many entrepreneurs, she was pursuing a business model that wouldn’t work. It happens quite a bit, because not every great idea can be a great business. In her case, the product’s price and the profit margin were too low to cover all the overhead costs, which is a fatal flaw shared by many start-ups and about 99% of the internet companies I invested in during the 1990s. After switching gears and changing direction, she described the new path she's on and sent me an upbeat update, including this priceless insight: “Currently unlearning everything I was taught to believe equals success and happiness, and learning that none of the things I thought would bring success and happiness are necessary for either of those things.” I’m very happy for her, because that’s a bit of wisdom that many of us miss as we keep pursuing the wrong goals on the basis of flawed advice. None of us gets through childhood without some adult telling us, “If you want to be X when you grow up, you have to Y.” And they’re adults, the big people in the room, the people who never ask us for advice and only give it, so they must know something. They tell us how to eat and how to behave and how to put on clean underwear before we get to the emergency room (or something like that) and how to build the financial security that we realize, in hindsight, they never achieved for themselves. Some of the advice is useful, like looking both ways before crossing the street, but much of it is terribly flawed. Without question, though, the worst advice we ever get concerns one or both of our most important goals: success and happiness. When we’re still young, we have no idea about this stuff. Even worse, some of the people who advise us have no idea, either, but they either don't realize it or they can't handle the truth. Looking back, we realize that the key to success we learned about at ten wasn’t based on the experience of the speaker, but rather on their own misconceptions about other people’s achievements. Even worse, none of the pearls they cast before us applied to us and our lives. It was impossible, of course, because we hadn’t lived enough of our lives to have a clue. It takes at least a few decades, sometimes more, for us to gain enough experience and scars and perspective to understand the whole thing, and our progress is slowed along the way by bad advice from people who really didn’t know. When we’re kids, we think adults have all the answers, mostly because they are bigger and stronger and older, but mostly because they keep telling us they have all the answers. When we become adults ourselves, we realize how little we know and how much we have to fake it on the path to making it. And that’s the point when all of us should be pausing like we’re in a sitcom and saying, “Wait a minute………. "I’m older and more experienced than the person who told me how to live my life six decades ago and I still don't have a clue, so why do I think they knew anything at all? Maybe I should get off the path they prescribed when I was, what, ten?" I'm very happy for my onetime colleague, needing less time than I did to take a fresh look at her own values and move forward with a plan of her own. “…none of the things I thought would bring success and happiness are necessary for either of those things.” We gain knowledge by learning new things. We gain wisdom by learning which ones to forget. We also gain wisdom by clicking here to subscribe to Dad Writes. |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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