The grand tragedy of youth, of course, is that we don’t have the experience and resulting wisdom to fully appreciate it until after we’ve lost it. Then, when the gravity of this notion genuinely begins to hit us, we try to get our favorite young people (typically our children) to understand.
Such efforts are futile, of course. I think sharp kids can get part of it intellectually, but they can’t feel it in their souls. Why not? See sentence number one.
Lea and I have had a lot to navigate over the past four or five years. To her credit and my credit, and with God’s help, the path has eased. I can’t say neither of us ever put a foot wrong, but I can say we were only very rarely out of step with each other, and then never to any consequence.
I remain in awe of the magnitude of this blessing.
What’s this got to do with the grand tragedy of youth? Well, I think Lea and I began understanding a major component of it on this journey: the illusion of control.
We believe we control much more than we do. And guess what else? We have to believe we control much more than we do. We would be paralyzed to inaction—or possibly incited to panic—without this illusion. Oh, we can steer ourselves a bit. We can wear our seat belts, eat mostly plants, and move our bodies regularly. We can save money for our children’s educations, and for our own retirements.
But there will always be stuff that torpedoes us at 2:15 on a Tuesday afternoon, and all we control then is our reaction.
Guess what? All we ever truly control is our reaction. I’m simultaneously terrified and comforted by this realization. But there’s no doubt it’s helping me to live my life more deliberately, and I needed that philosophical injection.
Thanks so much for these words. You and Lea are doing an excellent job of letting go. It isn’t easy.
Thank you, Jodi. God be with you and you know how to ping me too!
When reading that first sentence, I thought back to high school reading of Great Expectations by Dickens. It wasn’t until years later that I actually understood the bitterness of Miss Haversham and the molding of Estelle to be an emotional manipulator. In high school I could not understand, despite two endings, why neither was the “Disney” ending I came to expect as a reader. Of course, I was reading at a surface level and without the layers of experience to coat my rose colored lenses, I could not grasp the deeper themes within the story. Such is life. So whenever someone espouses about lost youth and little wisdom, my mind thinks of Great Expectations and how my expectations will always be limited to the microcosm of my experience. That is what makes these silos of information in social media and MSM all the more frightening because it’s just confirmation bias building us all up into this false sense of deep understanding, which feeds into the entitlement of control and the policing of the lives of others.
Except you have a major advantage over a frightening number of millions–you know what confirmation bias is, and therefore presumably take some precautions against it as you consume news and opinion.