By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
When I was a child, I envied grown-ups.
They seemed so self-assured, confident, and in control. They knew how to cook, and drive, and make you feel better if you were sick or hurt. They understood how to make important decisions, like whom to marry, what job to have, and where to live.
In short, grown-ups seemed to move smoothly through life without doubt or hesitation, knowing which steps to take at every turn in life’s rocky path.
Now that gray hairs have appeared willy-nilly on my head, I must finally admit that I am officially a grown-up. I have technically been a grown-up for quite some time. I’m still waiting for that magic moment when I move smoothly through life without doubt or hesitation. I don’t always know which step to take. Sometimes I can’t even see the path.
I have figured out that, when I was a child, all those grown-ups who seemed so self-assured were seeming that way so as not to worry the children. They were just as uncertain as I am now.
And I imagine that I am not alone. I’m surrounded by uncertain grown-ups who are trying their best to look less uncertain so as not to worry their families and friends.
In my brain, two competing impulses argue about what I should do. Part of me wants to retreat. Part of me wants to charge.
Part of me wants to live in a cabin in the woods and be a hermit and not read newspapers or watch TV or check my iPhone, see only people I’ve specifically invited, and write pithy, timeless thoughts in my journal.
The other part wants me to rush out and embrace the world in all its maddening contradictions and do what I can to save it from itself, spend my time doing good works for humanity, and forget about having great thoughts. Only action counts in this half of my brain.
Neither a total retreat nor a total charge is practical. There are all those pesky details: livings to earn, people to take care of, houses to tend to, meals to cook, not to mention limitations in my natural abilities.
I recently took an adult education class about World War II. When we look back, knowing that we won the war, and remembering so many war movies about courageous soldiers, we might think that all those grown-ups knew what they were doing, that they took the right step at every turn in the path. We would be wrong.
In fact, consider “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a song written in 1943, nearly two years after America entered the war. We sing different lyrics now, but in the original they sang, with hopeful wistfulness, “Someday soon we all will be together if the fates allow. Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”
It’s what grown-ups do. We muddle.
We choose a few values that we really care about: love for family, friends, humanity; freedom; nature; faith. We each choose our own.
Those are the flashlights we aim at the bumpy path before us. Sometimes the beam shines brightly enough to show us where to step. Sometimes it doesn’t and we have to guess.
As former president Harry Truman is said to have remarked, doing the right thing is easier than knowing the right thing to do.
Being a grown-up means being uncertain. We wobble, as we try to figure out the right thing to do and how to do it. We muddle through as best we can.
I wonder if we should tell the children.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net
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