And Now This

I am a strong and proud seven on the Enneagram. If you don’t anything about the Enneagram, just know that a seven’s greatest fear is feeling constrained by a lack of options. As a seven, my energy comes from anticipation of events that I believe will be more exciting, enriching, or pleasurable than what appears to be occurring in the given moment. I call it borrowing energy from the future. Not having something exciting to think about is the mental equivalent of being trapped in an elevator.

As I approach the age of 60, I am coming to terms with some harsh realities. First, I am as good at playing the guitar as I will ever be. This is due in part to the fact that I didn’t begin playing until I was thirty-nine. But the real limitation is simply lack of innate talent and my unwillingness to spend every spare moment trying to get the most out what ability I have. I can strum chords in time and play a few classic licks, but otherwise I am just your average guitar player coming to grips with his own mediocrity.

Likewise, I now accept that I am as good at golf as I will ever be. Even though I began playing golf at a much younger age than when I first picked up a guitar, the curse of mediocrity is the same. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day for me to put in the practice necessary to become a better golfer to a significant degree. Even if the hours were available, my inability to stay focused on one solitary task for a long time (I am a seven, remember) removes any glimmer of hope for improvement.

And, most difficult of all, I have given up on the fantasy of being discovered by someone who has been waiting for someone just like me to come along. I don’t have a clear scenario in my mind of who that someone is and what he or she might be waiting for; I just assumed that I would be the answer. It is clear to me now that, to use a common phrase, it just ain’t happenin’.

So here I sit, thirty years removed from the start of my professional career and only ten to fifteen years away from its completion. Let me be clear: I love where I am in my life. My relationship with LouAnn is stronger than ever (the secret: never stop doing fun things together); I work for myself doing what I love; and we have managed to surround ourselves with a group of loving, caring, and kind friends.

I still get excited about what lies ahead for me. This is probably due to the fact that some of what I consider to be my personal highlights occurred later in my life. I started my own consulting company at age 44; I played in my first rock band (mostly strumming chords) at age 54; I wrote a book at age 55; and I sang solo in a coffee shop at age 56. Not too shabby.

What I experience now is a more tempered kind of anticipation than before. I understand that the big rocks that make up my life are firmly in place. While there is still a sense of intrigue about what kinds of experiences will fill up the space between those big rocks, the youthful exuberance that leads one to believe they can be a rock star, a scratch golfer or a world-renowned consultant has rightfully dissipated.

And now this, grieving the loss of my 18-year-old son to a disease that is obscene in its level of brutality to the human body and damaging to the emotions of those who go on living.

I have learned two important lessons about grief. First, grief isn’t just another glass of water dumped into the emotional bucket, something else to make room for. Grief is more like a drop of food coloring added to the bucket: it changes everything. Like the water in the bucket, my emotional chemistry has been altered permanently. Everything looks and feels different than it did before. It would be easier to remove the coloring from the water than it would be to return to the way I used to experience the world.

Second, there is no finish line when it comes to grief. There is only the rest of your life to live to the fullest. For me, that requires that I remain vigilant in my battle with a spiritual and emotional DNA that leads me to look forward in search of what’s next. I am committed to my Enneagram task of learning to stay in the moment. To this end, I have done extensive reading on mindfulness and meditation and can at least recognize it when I start to go to that place of my own making in my head.

Clearly, I am a work in progress. But rule #1 is that I will be kind to myself along the way. This is hard stuff, trying to stay in the moment after an entire life looking forward. Not only is the final destination of the emotional journey unknown, it is unknowable. However, what I do know is that my life will continue to move forward in mostly predictable ways, punctuated with unexpected moments of sorrow and happiness, despair and joy. Such is the nature of life. And of grief.