Seeds

Reflections on a conversation with a friend …

Once we reach the 70s, most of us begin to look back at how we've spent our days. You’re not my age, of course. But one day you will be. And I think you’ll remember that one moment in your life in particular, that one terrible moment. I think you’ll replay it like a recording you can’t stop watching, just like you’ve been replaying it ever since it happened. I think you’ll hope, just like you’ve always hoped, that this time it will have a different ending. Just this once. A different ending!

I imagine you’ll feel, just like you’ve always felt, like you were a failure. Like you failed her.

I’m familiar with feeling that I’ve failed.

Sandy has been going through old photos she found stowed away in all kinds of hiding places in our house. We’ve looked at hundreds of old pictures together. What a life we have had! We faced struggles, too. Everyone does. As I looked at these old photos with warmth and affection, at times I thought of you, and sometimes I saw your face. There you were, gracing our history!

I want you to feel one day as we do now — that we've made our moments on this earth count. I cannot possibly convey the warm feelings I have about our lives, but also the swiftness of its arc. And we know now that life was always shorter than it once seemed. There is no time for boredom now. There is no time for replaying the past. There is no time for feelings of failure. There never was.

We are hopeful that you are turning things around now.

We want you to feel this joy when you reach our age. For now, it’s good to know that you’re happy and trying to sustain yourself again.

The seeds of our lives …,

yours and ours, were planted not so long ago. They got us started. What have we done with our brief time so far — with these seeds that carried such promise?

I think of this often now.

I wish that I could somehow tear from your mind the memories you have of that moment that must at times obsess you. But everything happened as it did and it is done.

I’ve made choices I wish I could have made differently. But I did as I did. There is an old saying …

In the moment of action, no man is free: he does as he is.

That seems an extreme statement, doesn’t it? It cannot be true … can it? Aren’t we all free? Well … yes and no.

The hurtful things I’ve done are outcomes of the hurt I had within me then. Whenever I let loose an outburst of anger, I’m not free: I’m acting out of something I’ve let torment me.

The trick, I’ve learned, is to take advantage of the moments between acting. These are the moments of our greatest power when we have choice and can prepare ourselves for how we might act when that next challenging moment comes.

All of which means that …

I have the power to remove the hurt today, this moment, to love today without the hurt, and to act as one who loves not as one who hurts.

You can forgive yourself today. You can! Today is a great opportunity.

To me, love starts there. It begins with acknowledging that I just forgot what I’ve been given. Love is a kind of remembering. I’m an old man staring at the lines of a face he sees in the mirror. But there … I see them … the seeds … still alive!