Looking ahead and behind

When Brian was in his first year of law school, we were friends with another law school couple, and they met us for dinner one evening with a replay of a conversation they’d had earlier at their church.    New to the community and the church, they were meeting lots of new friends and lots of new families.    One man, a father with several children in his forties, after hearing about their struggles as they embarked on their first year of marriage and graduate school, said, “Wow.  I’d love to have it all ahead of me like that.”  

At dinner that evening, we decided the guy was crazy.    All we could see were the piles of student loan debt threatening to swallow us whole as we sat in our crummy apartments with crummy jobs, with several years of the intense workload of law school ahead of half of us.   We were ready to have all of this behind us and reach the point where we could actually get started with life.

I hadn’t thought of that dinner, that conversation, in years until recently, as I sat in a local cafe talking to a young friend of mine who just started college.    

I feel fortunate that as Austin blazes his trail through the local musical theatre scene, and as I walk along behind him, I have the chance to get to know some of the teens and young adults that he works with.    I am the happy recipient of their strange text messages (does anyone email anymore?) and sometimes see more of their Facebook world than I need to.    

Watching them travel their respective paths, as the twenty-somethings struggle with self-discovery and the battle of their relationships and as the new high school grads face the shock and joy of the next steps and college life, should make me feel even older than I already do.    I hear myself thinking, “I remember how hard it was to deal with THAT,” and can picture this grandmotherly image of myself saying it, complete with rocking chair.    

But the reality is that when I’m sitting in the carpool line and receive a text message from a seventeen-year-old college freshman that I adore, and once I translate it, I realize she’s telling me how great her new acting class just was, I feel an uplifting joy as if I were the one who just left that acting class and realize what a rush I feel living vicariously through all of their adventures.   

So I sat in this little cafe a few weekends ago, where Austin and I had stopped between Will’s soccer game and Austin’s voice lesson, and I listened to my young friend/our waiter, also a college freshman, talk about the first few months of college life and pour out all of his angst and fears and confusion.   He’s a film student, a total artist type, incredibly brilliant, with all of the darkness that goes with that personality.    He’s anxious to get on with life, to move ahead, he’s tired of feeling in limbo.    

As he walked us out to our car, I refuse to tell him that in some ways limbo is all we ever really have.  

Instead I say, “Honey, you have all of this ahead of you.   Just enjoy this place you are now.   Stop worrying and just have some fun.    You’re going to wake up one day and wonder where it all went.”

Then I added, “Do it for me.   Just enjoy the ride.”   

He smiled and hugged me, but I realize no matter how strongly I feel, I’ll never convert him to the religion of enjoy your youth while you can hold it in your hand.    I guess some things we just don’t understand until we’re on the other side; at least, that’s what my sixty-year-old self whispers to me every now and then.