David McElroy

I always find myself re-evaluating my direction at the end of each year. It’s an inward-looking exercise in navel-gazing, but it serves a broader purpose.

When we get stuck on the wrong course in life, it’s hard to change that. But it’s almost impossible to make the change unless we’re willing to be honest with ourselves about where we are. If we can see what we‘re doing to ourselves, we have a chance of making a correction. If not, we’re doomed to stay on the wrong course for life.

I’ve been conducting my annual year-end evaluation over the last few days. Oddly, I have two image stuck in my mind, one from the past and one from the future.

The first image relates to some advice my ex-wife gave me many years ago. I’ve always known she was right, but I’ve never quite figured out what to do with it. This year, I can’t get it out of my mind.

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I was about 14 years old when this photo was taken, so my sisters would have been about 12 and 10. That’s Mary on the left and Rebecca on the right, mugging for the camera with someone else’s sunglasses.

I clearly don’t want to be in the photo. Mary seems ambivalent and Rebecca is having fun with it. Something about this seems like a good symbol of my childhood. We were all in the same places and going through the same experience for those years — but we reacted to it in radically different ways.

Even though it’s been decades, I can’t seem to leave that time in my life completely behind. I spent about 90 minutes this afternoon talking with Rebecca about some issues on her mind. It was surprising how many of today’s issues required one of us to ask, “Do you remember when…”

Even though my sisters and I have gone in very different directions — and we have almost nothing to do with one another anymore — we still can’t escape the drama and dysfunction of where we all started.

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