The Words Stayed the Same. I Didn’t.

We have been receiving advice since we were old enough to understand words.

Be careful.

Think before you act.

Don’t expect too much.

Everything happens for a reason.

It will pass.

There will be someone else.

You’ll understand when you’re older.

Some of it comes from people who love us. Some from people who think they know better. Some arrives when we didn’t ask for it, and some comes at exactly the wrong moment.

I remember hearing things like, “There will be another guy, be sure of that,” when another guy was the last thing I wanted.

Or the famous:

“It will pass.”

Of course it will pass.

Almost everything does.

But when you are right in the middle of something that hurts, you don’t know that yet.

You don’t know how long it will take. You don’t know who you will be when you come out of it. You don’t even know if the person telling you that understands what you are feeling.

So sometimes good advice sounds ridiculous.

Sometimes it sounds almost insulting.

And sometimes we hear the same words over and over for years without really hearing them at all.

I have been thinking about that lately because, among all the papers I have been going through and shredding, I found a few pages that I couldn’t throw away.

They are dated June 1999.

I titled them:

Love and Life — Words to Live By

There are twenty-four entries.

Apparently, twenty-seven years ago, I had been reading things that meant enough to me that I decided to collect some of the best advice I found and keep it.

I even sent a copy to someone through Yahoo Mail.

I have no idea who.

Part of the information is covered now, so that little mystery will probably stay in 1999 where it belongs.

But I have the words again.

And that matters to me.

One of them says:

Giving someone all your love is never an assurance that they’ll love you back.

Another tells us not to say goodbye if we still want to try.

Another says that the happiest people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; they make the most of what comes their way.

Another tells us to dream what we want to dream, go where we want to go and be what we want to be because we have only one life.

I read these things now and think:

I knew this?

Apparently I did.

At least I knew the words.

But there is a difference between knowing words and understanding what they ask of you.

Advice is only information until life gives us a reason to understand it.

I think that’s why the same sentence can mean absolutely nothing to us at one point in our lives and stop us in our tracks twenty years later.

The words haven’t changed.

We have.

There is another passage that I recently put on my wall. It is from Matthew 6, the passage about worry.

“Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

I have probably heard some version of that idea countless times.

Don’t worry about tomorrow.

Easy to say.

I am someone who could lose sleep because there was something bothering me or something I needed to resolve. My brain wanted the problem finished. If there was an answer somewhere, I wanted it now.

Now, I finally came up with my own interpretation:

If tomorrow comes, I will deal with it.

Not because I believe nothing bad will happen tomorrow.

Something might.

But why should I live it tonight too?

Why should I spend three hours worrying about something I cannot do anything about until morning?

Those three hours are still part of my life.

Worrying doesn’t only fail to add an hour to our lives.

It can take hours away from them.

And sometimes we sacrifice those hours worrying about things that never happen.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

I have been thinking about expectations in much the same way.

I put enormous expectations on my dream of becoming a writer.

It mattered so much to me that when things didn’t happen the way I imagined they would, it affected me more than I expected.

For a while I thought perhaps I had become less brave as I got older.

Then I started remembering myself.

I remembered the resignation letters I wrote.

I remembered leaving jobs because I knew I was finished with them.

I didn’t always know exactly how I was going to pay this or that. I didn’t have every step arranged before I moved.

I simply believed something else would come.

And many times, something did.

Maybe I didn’t become less brave.

Maybe this particular dream simply carried too much expectation.

There is a difference between having a dream and demanding that the dream happen exactly the way we imagined it.

I’m beginning to understand that too.

I still want to write.

I still want people to read what I write.

I would certainly love to make money from my words.

But I don’t want to turn every hour of my life into another working hour.

I already did that.

I spent so many years working . I spent years having my days and my time dictated by schedules and responsibilities.

This is the life I wanted after that.

If I wake up and want to write, I can write.

If I want to learn something, I can learn it.

If I want to go out, I can go.

And if I want to do absolutely nothing for a while, I can do that too.

Maybe “life is short” doesn’t mean we have to hurry.

Maybe it means we should stop wasting so much of it.

That thought became even stronger when I recently read advice from people in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond.

So much of it came back to the same thing:

Live.

Don’t wait too long.

Enjoy your experiences.

Stop worrying so much.

Don’t build a life around regret.

It struck me because we spend so much of our younger lives being taught something completely different.

Consume.

Buy.

Upgrade.

Have the best.

Get the bigger house.

Drive the better car.

Own things that somehow demonstrate that we are doing well.

Then people get older and so many of them start talking about time.

Experiences.

People.

Freedom.

Peace.

Very few people seem to reach the later years of life wishing they had accumulated more things.

And here I am, getting rid of mine.

Maybe that’s another reason those old pages affected me.

I have shredded thousands of pieces of paper lately.

Yet this one stayed.

Twenty-seven years ago, I thought these words were important enough to preserve.

Today, they mean something different.

There were things I wanted to do that I didn’t do.

At one point I wanted to live in my car for a year. People around me weren’t exactly lining up to tell me what a marvelous idea that was.

So I didn’t.

Would I have loved it?

Maybe.

Would I have lasted three weeks before deciding I had lost my mind?

Also possible.

I’ll never know.

But I know something now that I didn’t always practice then:

I don’t need everybody to understand what I want to do with my life.

If I decide I want to move somewhere in Europe, I can try to move somewhere in Europe. Why not?

If I decide I want to move to the Moon, well, NASA may have something to say about that.

But I don’t need permission to want it.

Maybe that is what some of these old instructions were trying to tell me all along.

Not that every dream will work.

Not that every person we love will love us back.

Not that another door will immediately open every time one closes.

Not that tomorrow will be easy.

Only that this is our life while it is happening.

And perhaps the strangest thing about advice is that we cannot force ourselves to understand it before we are ready.

Someone can tell us not to worry.

We worry.

Someone can tell us another door will open.

We stare at the closed one.

Someone can tell us life is short.

We behave as though we have an unlimited supply of Tuesdays.

Until one day, for whatever reason, the words come back.

Maybe on an old piece of paper.

Maybe in something someone says.

Maybe in a passage you have heard a hundred times and suddenly decide to put on your wall.

And this time you understand it differently.

I believe some things return to us for a reason.

Maybe not because we failed the first time.

Maybe because we weren’t finished with them.

I cannot recover the years between June 1999 and today.

And I don’t want to spend the years I have now mourning the ones that are gone.

That would only be another way of wasting time.

So I kept the pages.

I am still dreaming.

I am still trying.

I am still learning how to worry less, expect less, enjoy more and allow life to happen without demanding that I know the ending first.

I am even hoping patience grows on me.

We’ll see about that one.

But perhaps these words didn’t come back to teach me how I should have lived.

Perhaps they came back because I finally have enough life behind me to understand some of what they were saying.

The advice was there all along.

I just had to live long enough to meet it.