Backward

A few months ago, I saw something that intrigued me. It was a cabin cruiser in the harbor with My First Boat printed across the stern. “There’s nothing very intriguing about that,” you may say . . . but the way those words read caught my attention. Each one was printed upside down. The very smug-looking owner (admiring his work from the deck) had just finished painting the last letter. Of course, leaning over the water and looking down, he could read everything perfectly.

I laughed out loud, thinking, How clever! I don’t know if he did it just for fun or if he really thought we could see it right side up. But either way, I loved it because it made me reflect on how often my own boat has felt upside down. Driving along that day, I thought about my “first boat”— the skiff that took me to the shore of my dreams and dropped me off as an inexperienced ingénue in the days before I knew better or had a reliable map to guide me.

With nothing more than a college degree and heart full of anticipation, I was floating along as a complete greenhorn, trying to get sea legs.

In our youth, we think we can do anything and go anywhere. We head out to conquer new territory across the vast ocean of life, full of excitement, ambition, imagination, and ignorance. At least, that was my thinking. With the encouragement of my parents and my own personal aspirations, I hoped to find the sunken chest of life’s treasures.

In my twenties, I thought I knew everything there was to know about life. I fantasized circumstances where others would engage me in fascinating, enriching conversation including questions about life and how to solve its problems. I pictured open forums where I’d be seated before an audience of my peers, hands up all over the place wanting me to clear away the fog of their quandaries. Yeah, right.

Funny thing was, nobody asked me anything when I was young. Nobody cared what I thought. Nobody wanted problems solved by someone who barely knew how to raise a sail. It’s hard on our ego to face the fact we know very little and our paper-thin values do nothing but flap in the breeze. But that’s the way it was. And it’s even harder to realize we don’t learn life’s most important lessons until our boat has completely capsized and we’ve been forced to swim fast or tread water in an angry ocean.

And you want to know what’s even more disconcerting? Now that I’m in my seventies, with gray hair and brittle bones, people ask me questions all the time about how I’ve learned to stay afloat. They want to know the secret of being a happy single woman, how I survived in the corporate world, when I planned my career, and where I learned to balance time, energy, and money. They wonder what’s helped me the most as a Christian or how I experience the fullness of life. They ask about process, development, purpose, wisdom, passion, and lessons learned. All sorts of questions. Of course, they’re looking for answers to their own dilemmas, just as I did when I was their age.

But I don’t want to tell people how to solve their problems. I don’t know enough. When I’m ninety, I still won’t know enough! All I can do is take out my very marked-up map and point them in the direction of probabilities that lead to some degree of understanding and acceptance of themselves.

So that’s what this book is about. It’s a backward glance over seven decades of trying to figure things out so my little boat won’t turn over. I’ve divided this book into four parts, which correlate to the four phases of life through which we all progress—listening, learning, laughing, and loving.

In my younger years, I wish I had spent less time waiting for someone to ask me for answers and more time being willing to listen to those who had lived long enough to actually know some of the answers. If I had listened more, then I surely would have learned more—about life, about others, and about myself. And as I learned from others by really listening to them, then I would have been able to laugh more, because let’s face it: funny stuff happens in life. Although I didn’t listen or learn nearly enough in my younger years, I did learn to laugh. And as I stepped back to laugh at life and myself and situations, I was finally able to fully and freely love—to love God, to love who He created me to be, and to love all the people God has sent to enrich my life.

If God gives you a long life, one day you’ll be my age (or perhaps you are now). You’ll then take time to look backward too. Your brain will simply ponder the past whether you want it to or not.

You’ll have regrets and disappointments. You’ll remembers sorrows you bore and temptations you failed to overcome. You’ll smile when you consider joyful adventures and risks that catapulted you into achievement. You might even find tears welling up because of a loved one lost along the way or a dream that never materialized. You’ll feel grateful for the fact God never let you down and for His severe mercy that taught you lessons you could have never learned unless your heart was broken.

All of that is life.

Several years ago, a dear friend gave me a thin, colorful little book called The Atlas of Experience. It’s based on the theory that human beings have always been haunted by fundamental questions and searching for answers. This book opens before the reader a sea of possibilities on which we all travel. By means of its evocative maps and routes, one can follow many passageways that lead to shorelines where our imagination, ideas, feelings, experience and faith are enlarged. Questions may not be answered to our satisfaction, but we’re made to think.

That’s the way life works. It’s uncertain and has myriad ups and downs. If we cannot or do not learn from these uncertainties, we’ll repeat patterns that keep us treading water. And if we get stuck there, how will we find our sea legs? How will we become adults?

As long as we are in the human condition, we’ll have questions. You can count on it! A few of our questions will be simple and have easy answers. Others will be difficult, taking time to work out. Some will demand processing with counselors, friends, and God before an answer will come. And some of our questions will never be solved this side of heaven. We are not meant to know what to do. We simply have to trust the One who is the keeper of our hearts.

Don’t be afraid of life! God has given it to us to be celebrated fully.

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar