Quit being so angry; question yourself more

Apparently my 60th birthday, which I “celebrated” (I use the term loosely) this past week, has made an impression on me. I find I’ve mentioned it repeatedly in recent columns and Facebook postings.

Sorry. I promise you, patient readers of all ages and media, this will be the last time I bring it up. At least for a while.

Still, if you’ve read my scribblings for long, you know every year I devote a column to how I’m feeling about life, faith or random other topics when each new birthday rolls around. I annually try to take stock.

There’s some repetition in these self-assessments, because some of my beliefs and observations remain constant. But there’s also a certain amount of change.

Anyway, here goes, weighty and trivial observations for my 60th year:

▪  I find myself missing more and more people. Friends and family keep dying on me. Or they move to some other church or city. Or they just drift away. The more candles on your birthday cake, the more people you’ve lost.

The upside is, new people do come along. But it’s just so darn much work getting used to them and helping them get used to you. Sometimes it would be great to possess the power to bring old friends and family back.

▪  Being a grandparent is the best job ever. For my birthday, my granddaughter Hadley, 6, brought me a gift bag she’d put together with no prodding from an adult. Inside was a handmade card that said: “Hadley Happy Birthday Papa.” The card bore a crayon drawing of her and me standing together. And two dollars.

For you who are grandparents, I don’t need to explain how valuable that gift bag was. For you who aren’t grandparents (yet), I couldn’t explain if I tried.

▪  I’m not mad at anybody. I’ve always been a news junkie. But I can hardly watch the cable news networks anymore, because about the only thing news consists of now is exceedingly ticked-off people screaming at each other.

Sad to say, venturing out in traffic or shopping in a box store isn’t any better — half the people you encounter act as if they could bite the head off a 10-penny nail.

I’m old and I know a secret: Life is too fleeting to waste it on rage. Lighten up. Smile. Forgive. Move on. There’s not much that’s worth gnashing your teeth over.

▪  I’m not angry, but I also don’t care much what anybody thinks. I used to expend energy worrying about whether certain people liked me, or fretting over whether I was as smart as some other guy, or checking to make sure my socks matched each other and the rest of my clothes.

I no longer give a flying Wallenda.

I learned that people are fickle; they’ll like you one day and despise you the next, and vice versa, so why try to keep up with which day you’re on? I also learned that some of the smartest folks I knew were simultaneously the dumbest; brilliance in one arena doesn’t guarantee brilliance in other arenas. Plus, I decided to mainly wear white socks; whites match each other and blend with all other color schemes.

I am who I am. Like it or lump it.

▪  I’ve lost touch with pop culture. I’m a sucker for those lists that magazines and websites produce: the 50 most beautiful people, the 10 most dysfunctional couples on TV, the 20 highest-grossing country music acts of 2015, the 15 best actors, whatever. Give me a list, any list, and I’m all in.

Except now when I read these lists, I don’t know who the people are. None of them. They all look alike to me: same anorexia, same clothes, same hair and, in the case of country singers, same hats. Also, they all look 19 years old.

▪  I hope to never quit questioning. Recently an essay on the New York Times website summed up what I mean here.

“Anyone who does not occasionally worry that he may be a fraud almost certainly is,” wrote William Irwin, a professor of philosophy at King’s College. “Likewise, anyone who does not occasionally worry that she is wrong about the existence or non-existence of God most likely has a fraudulent belief. … People who claim certainty about God worry me, both those who believe and those who don’t believe.”

Or, as somebody else suggested, doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. Certainty is the opposite of faith.

I’d argue that’s true whether you’re talking about faith in yourself, faith in your politics, or faith in God.

If we’re to become self-aware, mature men and women, our duty is to relentlessly poke at our own supposed virtues, our ideologies and our deities — even before we poke at others’.

We humans are so frail, so fraught, such liars to ourselves. It’s hard to trust us.

And so we grow only by constantly questioning, by listening to those who differ from us, by not allowing ourselves to take ourselves too seriously. One of life’s paradoxes is, the less you think you know, the wiser you probably are.

This story was originally published April 2, 2016 at 11:03 AM with the headline "Quit being so angry; question yourself more."