Change

When you are 21, your head is full of ideals. Your future is unlimited. Your options seem open-ended. You can change the world!

But 30 years later, things have changed. If nothing else, you have changed. Your back hurts for no reason, for one thing. You’ve got a mortgage, and a car note, and health insurance, which is nice, because your doctor is on you to get your numbers down. AARP writes articles in their magazine that are pertinent to your interests, and friends are discussing how their 401K is doing. You choose shoes based on arch support rather than fashion sense. You are more Dr. Scholls and less Dr. Marten these days.

You are not all that has changed.

People you love are dying now. Some of them did that to themselves when depression took over, and some of them were accident victims, and some of them had random medical things happen, where they drop dead in a Wal-Mart while pushing a cart. Luckily, it doesn’t happen every day, but often enough that you are no longer shocked when it does. Every death reduces your footing in the world. Every time, you feel more and more unmoored, less attached. Every death makes a new world for you to learn how to live in – a world without them in it.

Your Senior prom date who was a genuine freak back in the day is now a grandmother who posts saccharine Bible verses on Facebook, and your Junior high prom date died unexpectedly during a global pandemic. The people with whom you ran from the cops through cornfields after the homecoming game afterparty was raided, now scream on Social Media that Blue Lives Matter and compliance with the law is the proof of virtue. They have lots of quote art on their walls when they post pictures of their grandkids.

Live. Laugh. Love.

Indeed.

Time no longer seems unlimited. Every tick of the clock is another moment gone, another lost opportunity, another unfinished project, another chance untaken. Based on actuarial tables, you have about 1800 Sundays left on this planet. That doesn’t seem like a lot.

While statistically, it is true that the world is less violent now than it was back then, that surely isn’t how it feels. Social media, a 24 hour news cycle, and the constant pinging of our devices remind us constantly of the pain the rest of the world experiences. It is relentless, persistent, and unending.

Surely we were never meant to be exposed to so much pain. To be clear, life on this planet for any species has always been a struggle for survival, and humans have not been the exception. Like the ladder in a henhouse, life for most people throughout history has been both short and shitty.

But also historically, we only knew of our pain. Or the pain of the people in our family or clan or village. Now, we know it all. It too seems relentless, persistent, and unending.

A stranger berates you on Instagram for sharing pictures of the flower you saw on your walk. After all, don’t you know people are dying in [The Inner City/Ukraine/ Palestine]!

You don’t know what to do about [The Inner City/Ukraine/ Palestine], but that doesn’t shock you, because you still struggle to balance your checkbook and you can’t figure out peace with your family at Thanksgiving, let alone how peace should happen in a culture and country and language that is foreign to you.

You don’t answer them. You have been yelled at by so many people over the years that disagree with you that you become reluctant to open the floodgates again. There are people in this world who like to argue with strangers, but none of those people are you.

And so you sit down at the keyboard and you wait for the words to come out, but they mostly don’t. You wish you had something brilliant to say, but would settle for something sensical. You worry that you will say the wrong thing, or that you will soft-peddle things, or that you need that health insurance a bit too much, and thus are reluctant to risk it by truth telling.

At different times, you feel like you are either sane or a sellout.

Once you wanted to change the world. Now you are worried about the world changing you.