I had a busy day planned to clean up my very overgrown yard, and spent about three hours doing that, when I was attacked by some sort of stinging insect and took two Benadryl as a result.
This led to a 4 hour nap, and a hangover that is leaving me melancholy with the sense I wasted a day.
There is this piece of dialogue from the movie City Slickers that made me gasp when I first heard it decades ago.
Mitch: Have you ever had that feeling that this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel… and it ain’t that great?
Station Manager: Happy Birthday.
In the NYT obituary for the comic Jonathan Winters, he was described as “more influential than successful”.
Now in my fifties, well into the second half of my life and work, I think about that line a lot.
More influential than successful.
One day you wake up and you look at all you have done and how much time you have left to do more, and you wonder if you wasted all that time.
A mentor told me once that he rose early because he begrudged the time spent in bed – he only had so much time left.
It feels like I’m running out of time. Did I make a difference? Did any of this matter? Did I sacrifice for the wrong things?
I look around at the state of the country and wonder if I will see the end of this experiment in democracy in my lifetime.
Social media makes this worse, of course. Because the likes and clicks and all that are visible, so you can end up feeling neither influential nor successful.
I love so much about social media – honestly, it’s made my life and career possible. But it is also bad for my mental health. I feel like the food critic who said the restaurant’s food was horrible, and the portions were small.
No pronouncements here, no actions as a result – just a drugged-up middle aged man’s melancholy, asking himself questions while on the couch.
Did any of it matter? Did I waste my shot? Did I make a difference? What do I do with what I have left? Is there any ice cream left in the freezer?
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By the time you get to 80 years old, you realize that nothing anybody does really matters. The only thing you can do is love the person in front of you.
Contra the preceding comment, every good thing you do matters, whether you see results for it or not. Like pebbles in a pond, their ripples will touch shores you can’t see. I’m sure the Benadryl has long since worn off, but you’ve done tons of good, extended tons of love, and have changed many lives, and love ALWAYS wins. I hope you got more ice cream if there wasn’t any in the freezer.