Finally at 74, I’m happy with my life and ready to celebrate it.
For longer than I care to remember, I’ve seen my life as a failure. I was disappointed with what I’d accomplished, and longed for an event that would justify my existence. Recently I’ve found myself “praying” for the grace to accept and be happy with the life I have lived. And today, upon awakening from a long sleep, I realized that boon had been granted.
I’ve always liked Buckminster Fuller’s motto, "Small Is Beautiful." I can see my life that way. My wife, Marilyn, and I live in a small house we sometimes refer to as a Hobbit house. Yet it is charming, warm, and we both find great pleasure and contentment in what we have done with it. We took a run-down little place and make it into a delightful cottage in the city, complete with a magical garden, in truth more a shady grove that songbirds and squirrels play in.
Marilyn’s artistry encompasses living things. She uses the
earth as her canvas and plants as her palette. She also tends a small allotment garden in High Park that has become her sacred place to touch into the earth and keep alive her farming heritage.
I have a small log cabin on the Big East River in Muskoka. It is my own sacred place, fulfilling my childhood dream to live in the woods. Mine is the quintessential cabin, with a large stone fireplace at one end. Logs honey-gold from age. Wood stove, sleeping loft, wind in the trees, rush of water, sunlight pouring in through rustic framed windows.
Even the occasional late-night call from a wolf pack baying at the moon.
I have a small circle of good friends, lifelong friends. Do I need to mention that the one thing not small in my life is my love, returned in abundance by my wife?
Yet there is more. How often I’ve bemoaned my lack of special gifts! No musical talent, no artistic vision, limited athletic ability… But I do have one faculty I’ve been blessed with: a knack for relating to others. I find myself easily and quickly feeling a simple, direct affection for people.
More often than not I seem to send out warmth to everyone I come in contact with, be it a stranger on the street or a guest in our home, that makes them feel good about themselves and glad to be alive.
Most of my life people have felt easy in my company. It’s a quality I was born with, the same way I was born with a birthmark on my face. And so on this day, I celebrate myself.