JetUNsetter

I had a friend over for coffee the other day. Aged 26. He claimed his biggest frustration was him realizing life passes and he does not know where he is going. Funnily, and told him so, a few days before I was with a 43 year old friend discussing the exact same problem but sipping bubbles (because that is the difference between 26 and 43, the price of the drinks you swallow along with life’s regrets).

I also just finished a chapter of the book where Bonnie Garmus explains parenting and rowing have something in common: you go through agony and pain without knowing where you are going. You only look backwards to where you have already been.

And that is what actually hit me: we go through life like rowers. We delve on the same question “where are we going” only because we are in fact looking backwards. Too afraid (or just too unequipped) to look ahead, we are comfortable looking back and keeping on rowing like an autopilot. It’s easier to keep asking the question “but where it is we are going”, thank actually looking. It’s easier to pass on all responsibility and hand over to the shortest and least strong in the team the authority to steer us to victory. We will have done our best, the sweat and all but we are not to blame. We did not know where we were going…

It might work in rivers. It does not work in the ocean. And life seems like the latter.

Why we do that? We keep too busy with where we have been. We swallowed all the versions of the “you are not good enough”, projected on us by unhealed parents. Whilst we keep busy fighting the daemons and the ghosts of the past, life happens. People meet us and are willing to love us, to actually give us their best, but no. It is urgent and important to make it straight with the ghost of that unhealed parent. We meet people, nice people, who want to be our friends and lovers. But no. We reject them to settle instead for anyone who just looks like that ghost. Because reliving with a version of that ghost might cut it for us. Might turn life back straight.

It’s a vicious circle of agony. A waste in agony. Life happens and opportunity is lost whilst we just want to rewrite our story. Heal the wound. Fill the void. Ok, it’s not our fault the wound and the void is there. The waste though is. Not allowing the good ones in our lives to love us, denying them our love back, hiding from committing with them, finding excuses for creating a good life with them is too much of a price to pay for a fault that was not ours.

Perhaps agonizing about changing the beginning is not the path to a better ending. Opening the door to love now, that same door the wound accidentally and clumsily closes, might, if fact, be our only chance to that happy ever after.

Please help me make sense of this one too, albeit chances are any of us lucky to pass 70 or 80 will realise the truth of it all inevitably. They all claim they did.