MY WAY

As I grow older I often think about my past life. The places I have been, the people I have met and the things I have accomplished. I guess if I were challenged to put it all in one word, I would say, “satisfied.” I look around me at the way my world has changed and although its still pretty damn good, I hoped for far more then this. I wished that someway, somehow, we would have managed to live in peace with each other better. I wished we wouldn’t have changed so many things in the name of personal freedom, and especially at the expense of the things that got us where we are, like morality and honesty. I wished for an end to the greedy and gullible way we defined success. But as Grandma said, “If wishes were horse’s beggars would ride.”

 Then I switched gears and zoomed in at what I could control—my own life. The late Frank Sinatra sang a song that’s lyrics spell out so well, how I feel today about my past life, in his song “My way.” I’m going to skip the first few lines because I don’t feel the end is near or anticipate the final curtain. But I do realize that realistically it is possible, so maybe writing this now is the prudent thing to do. I have lived a life that’s full and for so much of it, I did do it, “My way.” The fruits of my labors show not in any wealth I have accumulated, which by the way isn’t that much, but in the eyes, minds and bodies of the three children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren I call my own. No accomplishment in life could cast a shadow on me more then this does because I knew years ago that life was not infinite but my influence could be to some extent and that’s what kept me on the straight and narrow.

 Regrets, yes I have had a few. But unlike Frank they were not too few to mention. For you see if you want to bury your regrets someplace where you no longer go, then you’ve wasted their lessons. I’m not talking about living in the past, I’m talking about not repeating the mistakes of the past anymore then you have to and believe me if you think you can discount them as just some Freudian slip, then you will repeat them again, as sure as God made little green apples. The best men are born out of their faults. I, like Frank, did bite off more then I could chew on more then one occasion. Did I chew it up and spit it out? Maybe nothing quite that dramatic but I did face my problems and not run away from them and for the most part turned most of them into a learning experience.

 But it is in the last part of the song that I find the biggest message. Frank sang, “What is a man, what has he got? If not himself he has naught.” For years I have had on my desk, a poem by some anonymous person called the “Man in the Glass.” Look it up or Goggle it, because its message is something that should be every person’s mantra. In short it says to look in the mirror, because there you will meet the one person you can’t deceive.

This essay was too much about me and not about others far more worthy then I but in reality it rings true for every person who ever lived. My accomplishments, my victories in life pale in the context of many others but to me they were fulfilling and I truly feel that in the end, I will be able to say. I never cheated the Man in the glass.