No matter who you are or what you’ve done, time is your enemy

By David McElroy · November 26, 2017

When I first started picking up bits and pieces of their conversation, I thought the elderly man and woman were talking about Christmas parties.

“Martha’s is at 4 but it’s in Cullman,” the woman said. “That wouldn’t give us much time to get back for John’s at 6.”

“I know,” her husband said. “We’ll just have to leave early at Martha’s and maybe be a little late for John. Neither one of them will hold it against us.”

Then I realized they weren’t talking about social plans. They were talking about funerals.

The man and woman were probably in their late 80s. They seemed healthy and were mentally sharp, but they moved slowly. They had a page of newspaper obituaries in front of them. They were talking about the loss of friends and scheduling of funerals the way a younger person might talk of juggling Saturday night dates.

It struck me that death didn’t seem like that big a deal to them. They must have experienced enough of death that it wasn’t a looming existential crisis for them. It was just a very real fact of life that was slowly coming to get every one of their friends — and coming to get them, too.

As I was processing what I had observed from them, I noticed a man come into the restaurant with his small daughter. The little girl was about 4 years old and she was curious about everything. As her father ordered, she wandered around by herself, picking up straws and bags of chips and random pieces of paper from the floor. Everything seemed to fascinate her.

They sat next to me — in the same booth where the older couple had been sitting — and the girl was a non-stop chatterbox of questions. Among other things, she wanted to know why it took Christmas so long to come. As her father tried to talk with her about time, something occurred to me — and I never would have thought of it if I hadn’t just heard the older couple.

The advance of time doesn’t frighten children. They’re too young and inexperienced to know how short their lives will feel.

The advance of time doesn’t frighten the elderly. They know they don’t have that much time left. They’ve mostly come to terms with what has to happen before long.

The rapid advance of time is terrifying only to those in the middle — those who are old enough to appreciate how short life is but who are young enough to still do something to change their lives.

I don’t think I’ve ever really understood the idea of a “midlife crisis” until now. People who experience such a thing don’t just suddenly turn selfish and want to ditch their responsibilities. (Although that might happen, too.) These are people who suddenly realize how different their lives are from what they imagined — and that realization has them scared enough to make immediate changes.

When I was young, I thought I had forever to do the things I wanted to do in life. You probably felt the same way. Even though we consciously knew that every life ends, we felt we had enough time in front of us that there was no rush.

But nothing about life seems to work the way I thought it would. The hopes I had haven’t come true. I haven’t accomplished the things I had planned. Much of what I’ve tried has been unsatisfying. And the love I’ve needed still hasn’t come to stay.

By this standard, I’ve been experiencing a midlife crisis since the time I was about 30. It was about then that I realized something was wrong with the way I’d seen life. I knew my life had to change, but I had to learn so much — and change so much about myself — that it’s been a terrifying ride.

I feel as though I was thrown out into the sky with a box of airplane parts — many miles above the ground. Ever since I realized that, I’ve been desperately trying to assemble an airplane out of these parts — trying to figure out how to build it and fly it before I hit the ground.

A young person doesn’t really understand what it’s going to feel like when he realizes he’s falling toward Earth. An elderly person knows it’s too late to do anything about it. But someone in the middle stage knows he can still do something to make his life what he wants it to be — and he knows how little time he has left to do it.

Every single day, we are closer to the day when our bodies will be buried in the ground. Every day we spend doing things that make us miserable is a wasted day. Every day we spend delaying the changes we know we have to make is a day that’s put us closer to never becoming what we want to be.

You have some idea what you want your life to look like. I do, too. Most of what we do gets us no closer to that life. If you ask yourself each evening, “Did today get me closer to what I want my life to be?,” the honest answer for almost every day is a hollow acknowledgment that nothing changed.

You keep thinking you have plenty of time to make changes later, right?

You keep thinking that the changes you need to make are too scary, right?

You keep making excuses not to make the changes — because there’s some tradeoff that scares you. Right?

Every child thinks he has forever. Every person near death knows it’s too late. And those in the middle know we can still change our lives — but we let fear stop us from doing what we need to do.

Time is my enemy. It’s your enemy, too.

I’m making some changes before it’s too late. There are other changes I need to make, but I have no idea how. I just know I’m hurtling toward the ground as I try to put this airplane together and make it fly before it’s too late.

I’m scared.

But I still have way too much to do and be and love before I give up and hit the ground.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts