I have spent many days lately typing journals and sorting through memories while I’m rocking in the proverbial grandma chair. I continue to learn new things about life. I heard a saying once that haunts me, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” I would add, “If you make a plan and don’t carry it out, you are living in a fantasy world where anything can happen – but nothing of importance ever does.”
The words of the old hymn, “Time flies on wings of lightning; we cannot call it back,” ring with a certain pathos where I am concerned. I am still working on what happened to 2020, and the world is lifting the curtains on 2024. Where did it go? The words from Fiddler on the Roof have become my theme song. “Is this the little girl I carried? Is this the little boy at play? I don’t remember growing older. When did they? ... Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. ... One season following another laden with happiness and tears.”
The baby I raised from 9 months old is now 33 and has children of his own. They are nearly teenagers. His son looks just like him, and I almost forget that he is not my little boy of so long ago. The last of my adopted children are married or off to their own adventures, and my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are increasing every year. I often lament, “Who sped up the clock?” I don’t feel any older, except when I look in the mirror and see my mother, and now my grandmother, staring back at me.
With my husband’s death in December, I came face to face with the unhappy question, “How much time do I have left?” My husband and I felt cheated out of 20 years. His parents and grandparents had long lives, and we certainly planned to have a longer life together, but life and death wait for no one.
That final moment is not like coming to an end-of-year evaluation where you take “stock of what you have and what you haven’t,” as they say in Annie Get Your Gun. At the end of the year, you have time to start again and do a better job. But the end of life? That’s way different. It is summing up all the good and bad and weighing them against how you used your time. The question is not, “Have I succeeded?” but, “Have I left anything of value in my treasure chest of life? Will my legacy have made a lasting difference in the lives of my family and the world?” When the last day comes, it is finished. No chance to do it all over again. No chance to make amends or restack the deck for another game. It is over. The last act. The final curtain.
Now, as I sit in the grandma chair creaking back and forth, the question is, “What contributions can I make that will last beyond my passing? What can I do in the cramped-up days of my future to make a difference to my family in the years to come?”
Time is the key that unlocks the secrets of the future. They say we spend time on what we value. Mostly, that is a bald-faced lie. We spend time on what we allow ourselves to think about. We might value time with our family, but we don’t take time to think about what we can do to show them they are a high priority, so we spend time slipping down the path of least resistance. We watch TV because we haven’t planned anything better to do. We mindlessly flip through the channels to see what is on. We habitually get disgusted by the news and have an angry conversation about politicians and world events. We pontificate on how we would run things if we were in the government, but solutions are easy from the easy chair. We may value our family, but we spend our time on what is convenient because we fail to plan.
We might not choose to watch TV, but Facebook is our outlet. We have a million friends, but we never really get to know any of them face-to-face. We get to know the face they paint, and they get to know our painted self. We spend hours stamping our “likes” and “dislikes” on the daily posts of others, and drop an opinion here and there, but never get around to making meaningful honest posts about our own lives. We watch YouTube videos and laugh or get disgusted, but we never make a video of our own. Oh, we plan to someday. We plan to do something great someday, but there is a big difference between the blueprint and the building. It is the same difference between fantasy and reality.
Memories, like monuments, need to be planned and executed with precision. If we want to have grand memories in the future, we must plan to live grand events today. What are grand events? They are anything you want them to be. What do you want to remember when you are sitting before the dying embers in your grandparent chair? What do you want to play on the instant replay of your mind? Is it the moment you posted the trillionth “like” on your Facebook, or is it when you snuggled with your child over a storybook or took a wilderness hike with your teenage son or daughter? Is it the time you watched your favorite actor destroy a city in the latest movie, or will it be when you saw your wife’s smile when you washed the dishes or brought her flowers? Will it be the glowing candlelight dinner or a pizza in front of the TV? Will it be when you were the high school baseball star or when you taught your child to pitch, and they became the star? Will you get more joy from a text message or a face-to-face encounter? That is the wonderful thing about choices. You get to choose.
Sitting in the grandma chair, I have some time left. Who knows how much? None of us do. I am taking stock of my memories. There have been some monumental memories that take my breath away. It is interesting; none of my glorious memories have been in front of the TV, the computer or a smartphone. My best memories have been with people I love. My childhood memories include camping trips, wood gathering projects, weeding the garden with my mother, hiking the Grand Canyon or sailing down the Colorado River with my friends. My memories include face-to-face and heart-to-heart communication with my friends and family members. I am so glad I didn’t have a technological device to stand in the way of those moments because those moments changed my life and often the lives of the ones I loved.
Then there were the journeys I made in the mind of the great writers. The books they wrote made such a difference in the choices I made in my life. I systematically chose literature that could build and enhance my mind. The scriptures were always a big part of my reading menu. I am so glad because I got to know Jesus through my reading, prayer and acting on the promptings I received.
Of course, too many of my choices were spent sliding down the path of least resistance. I didn’t always plan, and I have regrets. That’s how I know that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. The tragedy is you may not know you have failed until years later. You may be rocking in the grandparent chair, sorting through memories, before you realize texting across the dinner table, watching the latest movies and eating pizza in front of the TV with your kids really wasn’t the path to true happiness. You might even wish you had spent a few more days walking in the forest listening to the heart talk of your children and your spouse. You might realize too late that true lasting happiness is a journey of making someone else happy, not a quest for more toys.
Spend time planning the memories you want to have. You will be surprised how many of them come to pass. Of course, you must work the plan; otherwise, it is the memory of a fantasy waiting to happen.
