Y'all Come Sit a Spell

What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?

I could tell you to save money. Wear sunscreen. Take the pictures, even when you don’t like how you look in them. All solid advice. None of it is the thing I most wish I’d understood earlier.

I would tell you that the life you imagine is allowed to change.

That sounds simple until you’ve spent years building yourself around a particular version of the future. You know where you’re going, who will be beside you, what you’ll do when you get there. You may not have every detail worked out, but you can see enough of it to believe you’re headed somewhere.

Then something happens. Sometimes it’s catastrophic. Sometimes it’s a slow accumulation of smaller things. Sometimes nothing terrible happens at all, and you simply realize that the person you’ve become no longer wants the life the person you used to be planned.

Any one of those can leave you standing there with a map that doesn’t match the road.

People are quick to tell you to move on. They may mean well. They may be uncomfortable watching you grieve a future they can’t see. But you’re allowed to grieve it. A life doesn’t have to have happened for its loss to hurt. You can miss the plans you made, the person you expected to become, and all the ordinary Tuesdays you thought you’d get to live.

What I wish someone had told me is that grieving one future doesn’t mean you’ve given up on having another.

This morning I watched Michael J. Fox speak about living with Parkinson’s. He talked about accepting his diagnosis without surrendering to it. I keep turning that distinction over in my mind. Acceptance asks you to see what is true. Surrender tells you there’s nothing left to do. Those are very different places to stand.

He couldn’t keep the future he’d imagined before his diagnosis. That loss was real. So was the life and the work he built afterward. It would be cruel to point to everything he accomplished and suggest the disease was somehow a gift. He did those things while carrying something hard. His courage lies partly in refusing to let that hardship be the only thing his life could mean.

I remember a story about a woman whose husband was a firefighter killed on 9/11. The story told of their love, their family, and the life they had together. At the end, it mentioned that she had healed and found love again.

That ending stayed with me. She didn’t get their life back. Loving someone else didn’t make the loss smaller, or replace the man she’d loved. There was simply more life ahead of her than she could have seen in the worst moment of it.

We tend to talk about healing as though it finishes a job. As though one day you put the old life away and step neatly into the new one. I don’t think people work that way. You can carry a love forward and make room for another. You can ache for what was supposed to happen and still be glad for what did. You can have a good day without declaring all the bad days over.

Perspective isn’t pretending things turned out fine. It’s being able to see more than one truth at once.

Perseverance isn’t always a dramatic speech or a heroic decision, either. Sometimes it looks like getting up and making coffee. Sometimes it’s taking care of the people who are still here. Sometimes it’s laughing at something you didn’t expect to find funny and feeling a little guilty, until you realize laughter was never the enemy of love.

And sometimes perseverance means admitting that the vision itself needs to change.

That part can be frightening even when no catastrophe caused it. We talk about following a dream as though a dream arrives fully formed and waits patiently for us to execute it. In my experience, dreams are considerably less organized. Mine have left notes in odd places, vanished for a while, then shown up years later and acted as if we had an appointment.

I almost started a blog a long time ago. I say “almost” because the bones were there. I had things to say. I had thoughts I’d return to, little scraps of stories, arguments, observations, and the occasional line that made me laugh at my own cleverness. I could picture a place for them. I just didn’t take the steps that would make that place real.

I’ve thought about those earlier attempts several times this month. It would be easy to look backward and scold myself. Why didn’t I start then? Why did I let fear of what people might think get between me and something I wanted to do? Imagine what I could have built by now if I’d just gone ahead.

That last one is particularly seductive. The imaginary blog I started years ago has had years to grow. Of course she looks impressive from here. She never had to survive an actual Tuesday.

The truth is, I wasn’t ready then. The ideas were real, and so was the fear. Both belonged to the person I was at the time. I can wish I’d begun sooner without treating that version of me as a failure.

Here I am now. The blog exists. The words have somewhere to go. People are reading them, including people I’ve never met. Some names keep appearing. New ones show up, too. After all those years wondering whether anyone would like what I had to say, I’m finally giving them the chance to decide for themselves.

I don’t think I could have forced this version of the porch into existence twenty years ago. I could have started something, certainly. Maybe it would have lasted. Maybe it would have taught me what I needed to know. But this place, with this voice and this life behind it, could only be built by the woman who is here now.

The time had to come to me.

I know that can sound like an excuse when you’re young and impatient, or older and angry about the years you think you wasted. I’m not suggesting you sit around waiting for a sign. Take the step you can take. Write the paragraph. Buy the notebook. Tell someone what you’re dreaming about. Try, if you’re able to try.

I am saying that an idea doesn’t expire because it hasn’t become a finished thing yet. You can come back to it with more experience, a different voice, or a better understanding of why it matters to you. The bones may still be there. They may be waiting for you to see what they can hold now.

This applies to plans that fall apart, too. The new vision isn’t always visible on the day the old one breaks. You may have no interest in hearing that something else could be beautiful. You may need to sit with what happened, and nobody gets to set a deadline for when you’re done.

But someday you might notice a door you didn’t know was there. You might walk through it because you’re curious, or because you have no idea what else to do. You might find people on the other side. Work that matters to you. A laugh you thought you’d lost. Love you hadn’t expected.

You can be grateful for those things without being grateful for the circumstances that led you to them.

That’s an important distinction. I don’t want to turn someone’s devastating loss into a tidy lesson about how everything happens for a reason. Some things happen and they are awful. People make what they can of the life afterward because they are still alive and that life belongs to them.

Sometimes what they make is beautiful. Sometimes it is better than what they could have imagined before. That doesn’t mean the loss was necessary. It means the human capacity to keep loving and creating is bigger than the first map we drew.

So if I were sitting across from someone younger than me, I’d tell them this:

Make plans. Want things. Give yourself the pleasure of imagining a future. When you can take a step toward it, take one.

And if the road changes, let yourself be upset. Grieve what you have to grieve. Then, when you’re able, look around. You may need a new vision. You may need to return to an old one with different eyes. You may discover that a dream you thought you missed has been quietly keeping a chair for you.

You haven’t failed because your life looks different from the one you pictured.

And you haven’t missed your chance just because it hasn’t come yet.