The Age of Adjustments

It’s 5:00 in the morning, and I am wide awake. My eyes opened at 4:30. I gave it thirty minutes but finally gave up. I have a mountain in front of me, no point staring at the ceiling in the dark. Might as well get up.

One of the great deceptions of life is the notion that at some point, by dent of hard work, discipline and force of will, it gets easier. Not true. What it gets is...different. I’m 60 years in and I find that I’m constantly having to learn new coping skills. The only constant seems to be the constancy of change. Just about the time you master something, a new challenge arises. 

Just about everything in this world is unrecognizable from how it looked when I was a kid. The differences aren’t all bad. Some things look better...my bank account for one. Other things are worse...our politics, while never truly civil, has now become toxic. Most everything else is just...different. A few examples:

Church. Completely different from what it sounded and looked like when I was a boy. I grew up with robed choirs, hymn books, ladies in their finery, men in their gray suits, older men nodding off, older woman fanning themselves with the funeral home fans provided them in the hymn rack right beside the King James Bible. The preaching was loud and forceful. There were alter calls, pleas for public professions of faith, emotional appeals.

Now, where I go to church, there are no robes. There’s a band. The words to the music are on a screen hanging from the ceiling. The ladies don’t wear hats, even on Easter, and not a single man wears a suit. The pastor wears jeans and an untucked shirt. There are no hymn books, no hymn racks, no pews, just metal framed chairs hooked together. There aren’t pleas, emotional or otherwise. The preaching is conversational, no yelling.

Some of these changes have been difficult for me, others I’ve welcomed. But, despite it all, I have come to love my new church. I have adjusted. I have chosen to make peace with some of the new stuff that I don’t prefer, and embrace the new things that I like. Like everything else in this life, it has been a work in progress.

Parenting. Completely different than it looked and felt like twenty five years ago. Back then, we were in charge. They depended on us for everything. We dominated their lives. Now, there’s the empty nest. While some parts of empty nest-ism has been wonderfully freeing, being separated from their lives by hundreds of miles is quite different from what it would be like if they were merely across town. We are no longer in charge, they no longer depend on us, and while this is mostly a huge relief, it is also strangely jarring. 

Pam and I have made the adjustments to our new rolls in their lives, but not without some struggle. We have learned to cope with the distances that separate us. We have learned to make the most of the few days a year when we get to be with them. It is the new reality, and we are learning to make the most of it.

Work. Building a business is a very different animal than maintaining one. I spent the first five years of my career trying to survive. Then I spent the next fifteen years establishing a working formula for success, the next ten years consolidating that success, and now trying to figure out how to maintain it all. Each of these things requires a different skill set, which has forced me to learn new things, change some habits, establish new ones. Drifting doesn’t seem an option.

Health. I was asked the other day by a doctor a series of stupid questions which were...Can you run as fast today as you could when you were twenty five? Can you lift as much weight now as you could when you were thirty? Are you as sharp and quick on your feet mentally as you were when you were thirty five? If not...welcome to the Age of Adjustments.

So that is pretty much what life is like now. It’s the Age of Adjustments. I can’t eat the same things I’ve always eaten. I can’t do the same things I’ve always done in exactly the same way and expect the same results anymore. This older dog must learn new tricks.

But, what’s the alternative? I can become a stubborn old dude, stuck in the past, refusing to adapt to the facts on the ground all around me...or I can adapt, make some mid-course corrections. I can complain about the sloppy dress around me at church, bemoan the musical style that doesn’t suit me, rail against Nashville and Columbia, become embittered by the ageing process. Or, I can learn a new way and cope with my changing world with a mixture of grace, humor and flexibility. There are but two choices.

I choose grace.

But it won’t be easy. Life never is.