I have find myself reading a lot lately. Odd for the dyslexic to read so much. Most of it has been personal development of one sort or another as I have recommitted myself to living a fuller life. There are some weeks I am in a book store 5 days a week. Many times just reading a chapter or two of a book I have no intention of buy. Other times looking for some good travel reading.
Last week I bough Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now by Gordon Livingston. When I first picked up the book I read through the table of contents figuring I would find the short list of the 30 true things I needed to know. From this list, the book looks good, but that is not why I bought it. I bought the book for an odd reason, the name of the 12th chapter. (Be careful, this is going to be harsh.) The chapter is titled “The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting.”
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the elderly or their suffering. Mine is going to come soon enough. The reason the title struck me was because of the way that I had spent two days prior to buying the book, two days filled with (minor) suffering (and lamenting ad nasium).
I was at a meeting in Savannah, GA with 200 other people. The meeting ended on a Saturday night and most of us were scheduled to leave Sunday morning. By mid-day Saturday ice was coming from the sky in Atlanta. The 1/2 inch of ice that accumulated on the ground understandably shut down the airport in Atlanta for about 24 hours. Being one of the busiest airports on the world, this reeked havoc for many travelers, including many of my friends and me.
Many did not get out until Tuesday. I ended up renting a car and driving home. At one point I was even on a plane that was loaded and ready to go, minus on detail. We had no one to fly the plane. They had mistakenly left the airport for a Savannah hotel.
In the end the details are unimportant. What I was struck by was the amount of time we spent in the lobby retelling our plight in detail to each other. Serious (maybe), but very very boring. I find myself trapped in Savannah with the adult equivalent of a snow day with a bunch of very cool people, and we decide to spend our time talking flight times and snow plows. Very boring. At one point I grabbed two friends and we went to a deli to eat and make fun of each other. A better use of time for sure.
It is amazing our need to tell uninteresting stories of our suffering. Not that suffering isn’t to be talked about. There are wonderful opportunities to have catharsis by sharing what is going on in our life, but sometimes we just keep telling the same story over and over again. Adding nothing to the discourse and not help us. We don’t tell the wonderful stories of our life. It is as if the only way we can show our humanity is to show are scars.
Goal of today: Share stories of wonder, not suffering (at least until I get the chance to tell how I was knocked out for a week, unable to eat, sleep, or stand when I had my wisdom teeth out.)

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