Tag: lives

Your Immediate World Gets Quieter As You Get Older

“Loss of loved ones and their physical presence leave a gaping hole in our lives never to be replaced. Yes, you can make new friends, establish new loving relationships, but long past are the days from your youth or even adulthood where you can count on a grandparent or even a parent to be there by your side, providing you their unconditional love, support, or encouragement.”

While we all wish for some lasting peace and quiet from time to time to find serenity in a world that becomes more intrusive and invasive. At the same time, we yearn to hear thoughts and voices again of those long lost from our lives. While the wider world can get loud, obtrusive, or downright annoying with its cacophony of sounds and noises, we yearn unsuccessfully for the unique sounds and voices from those who are long gone from this world, never to be heard from again.

Loss of loved ones and their physical presence leave a gaping hole in our lives never to be replaced. Yes, you can make new friends, establish new loving relationships, but long past are the days from your youth or even adulthood where you can count on a grandparent or even a parent to be there by your side, providing you their unconditional love, support, or encouragement.

We may be surrounded by people every day, mostly strangers, maybe a few friends, but our inner world shrinks down further when we lose the people who knew us best. Very few people in this world are there with you from birth or childhood and they can never be replaced once they pass away. When someone you’ve known your whole life goes away, it leaves a deep empty feeling and a kind of quiet that sustains just how a big loss it was from your immediate world. Memories and mementos help to ease the pain, but they are only a poor substitute or a shadow at best when it comes to establishing just how much they meant to your life.

How does one deal with the huge void that your loved one left when they passed? Well, I don’t have any easy answer here, but it’s important to do your best to think about how they would see you now that they are gone, what they would think about your life now even though they’re no longer there with you, and how would you honor their memory as best as you can with what you shared with them during your time together. Telling their story to others, putting yourself out there to establish new friendships or relationships, and preventing yourself from isolating yourself further from the wider world are all good ways to move forward even if the quiet remains when you can no longer talk to them or hear their voice.

Perhaps that is one of the stranger realities of getting older: the world around us may become larger, while our immediate world becomes smaller. We meet new people, travel to new places, build careers, fall in love, make friends, and create lives that our younger selves could never have imagined. Yet there are certain people from our earlier days who belong to a part of our story that no one else can ever occupy. We may have known them 20, 30, 40 years or so from our life’s beginning but they don’t get to see how the second half of our lives play out without them there to guide or help us. When they are gone, we don’t simply lose a person who was special to us. We lose one of the voices and presences that helped make our world feel like home.                     

Maybe the goal, then, isn’t to eliminate the quiet that remains. Maybe it is to learn how to live alongside it. To carry the stories, habits, humor, lessons, and memories of those we’ve lost into the lives we are still living. The quiet is painful because it reminds us that something precious is missing, but it is also evidence that something precious was once there. Perhaps the best way to honor the beloved people whose voices we can no longer hear is to keep living loudly enough that, in some small way, their influence can still be heard and felt through us.

Is ‘The Grass Always Greener’ On The Other Side?

“There is a sense of whimsy about wishing what would your life be like if you had made a different decision or if a different opportunity had come your way.”

The popular English language expression on ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ is a common refrain when discussing the possibilities of where one could see themselves in a different reality or circumstance other than their own. There is a sense of whimsy about wishing what would your life be like if you had made a different decision or if a different opportunity had come your way. You may even want to switch places with someone else you know or someone you admire or someone you read about. Beyond that, it could also be wanting to live in a different city or country or to experience a different culture or set of customs other than the one you were born into or grew up in.

I find that there is nothing wrong with daydreaming about the possibilities for change or how to make your life better or more successful. I do think it is a good thing to be reflective as well on how others live, what you can take from their example or even discard based on your own perspective, and to not be afraid to even experiment with making different choices in life based on what others have done ahead of you. It is good to be inspired by other people, read about their lives, and to change your own approach to how you live, where you work, how you act, and what you can be within reason.

I think, however, that it is important to not be fantasizing all the time about how others live or envious of other people without knowing the full story. Being obsessed with mimicking or copying other people is also a recipe for disaster in my view. It is okay to be influenced by others around you who are making a positive impact and living life in a successful and moral manner. However, it does not justify being a ‘copycat’ or a ‘sycophant.’ Often, we must think for ourselves, make our own decisions, and to live a life true to our own morals, values, and code. Doing what others do just because they think it is ‘popular’, ‘cool’ or ‘successful’ is not what a mature individual should be following.

You may think that the other person or group of people has it all figured out, but the reality is much more complicated than that. You may envy the house, the car, the lifestyle, or the personality they have but often, you only know the surface of what you can see about that person. The same goes for endlessly admiring another city, country, or culture. It is okay to admire and adopt those customs, the food, the language, and the beliefs, but it’s important to take a step back to see what is compatible with you and what you would rather not adapt as your own self-expression.

As another saying goes, ‘walk a mile in another person’s shoes’, that is not a bad thing to do in life. Still, to automatically wish to live like them, be like them, and change who you are entirely is losing your own conception of self in the process. I am a fan of learning about other people, their backgrounds, their cultures, and their viewpoints, but that should be a way for you to more fully accentuate who you are as a result rather than change you are entirely. It’s good to see how others live, why they live like that, and be the more educated and worldly for it, but there’s a limit to how much we can live like those people.

Instead, use those variety of experiences, either lived or learned, to water ‘your own grass’ to be ‘greener and livelier.’ Instead of envy, jealousy or obsession, be more concerned with how to live a life that’s truer to yourself and what you wish to achieve. Think about what you’ve learned, seen, or heard, to adapt that to benefit your own life. Adopt those practices that will make your life better and make you a better person. Use your expansive knowledge based on living in different places, meeting different people, or studying different topics to make your life much more fulfilling and richer. We never truly have all the information regarding the lives of others and often we just see a snapshot of it rather than the full picture.

This is the same when we visit a place or even live there for a little bit of time. Even with that knowledge of a place and a people, we are not born there, or grew up there, and it limits our perception of what is going on there to some degree. Regardless of if you’re envious, apprehensive, dismissive, or neutral about a person, place, or culture, you should not automatically think that where you are or the ‘grass’ on your side is better or worse than theirs because you really can’t even make a real judgment.

You can always ‘walk in other’s person’s shoes’ for some time but you’ll never fully live in their shoes as they do. The same goes with where, why, and how we live and comparing it to others’ lives we learn about as they may want to have our life and we may want to have theirs, but we should remember that we will never have the full picture regarding their life’s circumstances. Instead of envying the ‘grass on the other side’ that we are constantly exposed to in person and online, you should remember to focus primarily on watering, fixing, and shaping your own ‘grass’ under your own feet and in your life to make it a more fulfilling, joyful, and happy kind of life to live.