"We don't understand life any better at forty, than at twenty, but by then we realize it and admit it." That's a quote by Jules Renard. Jules was a French author. He wrote poems, short stories, and plays, for the most part, but also had one famous novel. His most-famous work was Carrot Top, if you can believe it.
Renard died at the ripe old age of forty six, so I guess we'll never know if he would have figured it out by sixty. I am now fifty, and I can tell you that my understanding of life is always in flux. Not in a bad way, mind you, but just constantly changing. In general, my understanding of life seems to change every five to ten years. When I was ten, my baseball card collection and my ability to play sports were VERY important to me. I played all of the sports during their seasons, and tried to be as good as I could at each of them. Sports were my world! As I hit fifteen, I became more interested in partying. A lot of the "cool" kids were into drinking, and I foolishly drank along with them. My friends and I liked to get a buzz, and we all couldn't wait until we could get in the bars. By twenty, not much had changed. I was still partying every chance I got, and getting into bars was old hat. New York's drinking age had been eighteen when I turned eighteen, and I was grandfathered in once the drinking age went to 21. I worked in New York during the summer months, so my friends and I took to hanging around Bleeker Street on Friday or Saturday nights during my early twenties. In my late teens and early twenties I stopped drinking for a bit, going so far as to joining AA for a bit. I remember I was sober on my twenty-first birthday. I was stressed out and depressed though, and went back to drinking a few months later. My drinking was different now, though. I was no longer drinking just for the buzz, I knew it was bad for me and I was drinking more out of boredom, or so I told myself. By thirty I was a functional alcoholic. I held a good job at Merrill Lynch and I was looking for a girl to settle down with. I met my wife when I was thirty three and she was only twenty three. She too, had a problem with alcohol, and she asked me to help her stop drinking. I gave up drinking the moment she told me that (July, 1999) and I have not had a drink since. My understanding of life had gone from let's make lots of cash and get a buzz to: "we can have a beautiful life together if we can both quit drinking." Two years later, my first daughter was born, and my priorities grew to include spending as much time with my wife and daughter as possible. I left corporate life in late 2002, and started my own consulting firm from my basement. My life revolved around my wife, my daughter, and my work. In 2009, my mid-life crisis began... although at the time I didn't know it. Sharon and I had decided to have another baby. Sharon had never been able to stop drinking excepts for about two years while she was pregnant with, and then breast feeding Maddie. We had originally wanted to have three children, but stopped after Maddie because Sharon had had postpartum depression and was afraid to have another bout with it. Sharon then began to believe that if she had another child she would be able to stop drinking during the pregnancy again and hopefully stop for good. Her drinking had gotten progressively worse over the years, and Madison had begun to catch on to what was happening. To make a long story short, Sharon was not able to stop drinking, and we put her into an in-patient facility to keep her from drinking while she was pregnant. She made it through the system and returned back home two weeks before she was due with Ashleigh. She started to drink again that evening and the doctors decided to deliver Ashleigh early to help protect her. I brought Ashleigh home from the hospital when she was four days old, She was two weeks premature, underweight and had alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Maddie was home with us too. At forty four, I was raising a new-born baby and a seven-year-old little girl on my own, while also trying to keep my successful business running and keeping the house in some semblance of shape. Let me tell you, my understanding of life, and what truly was important grew in that time period. I am now fifty. At this point, I think there is no one true understanding of life. All of our experiences are too different. The more we share similar experiences, I think the more our understanding of life will be similar. Not the same, but similar. Honestly, I think that part of the reason that the divorce rate is so high is because couples are not able or willing to spend enough time with each other. Their common experiences become fewer and fewer, and they eventually drift apart. So, do I understand life? Nope. I understand what I am doing in my life at this moment, but I have no clue about what awaits me in the years ahead. Lord knows that if you had asked me where I would be in five years at any point in my life from say the age of twenty five on, I would have likely guessed wrong. In the end, life is for living. Have fun, make memories with the ones you love, and pray that you will be able to see them again in the afterlife.
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