Has Your Life Ever Surprised You?

Decades travel at the speed of a “don’t blink, you’ll miss it” kind of rush. When we were teens or young adults, we thought we would never, ever see the time when we were called “senior citizens.” But, sure enough, every single one of us arrives blinking our eyes in surprise and wonder! Of course, when we finally do get to our mountaintop, our minds play tricks on us and we still think we are twenty years younger than reality.

Life is Still Good if We Give It a Chance

Every season of our lives has its pros and cons. In our college years, life started happening all at once. Joyfully or not, we were separating from our parents and envisioning a lifetime of great success, the “I can’t live without you” type of perfect relationships, and happily doing things our way.

Between our 30s and 40s, life started revealing its true nature. Things were different than we originally imagined but still manageable. Our energies slowed a bit and then took off again, as we adjusted our goals to fit our lifestyles. Here we learned the difference between “Me, Me, Me” and “We, We, We.” Life was good as long as we were willing to open our hearts and minds to the world.

Midlife comes onto the scene with a vengeance! For some, it is a shock to look in the mirror and discover a new landscape or an entirely new life. Now we remember all those things we wanted to do thirty years prior before interruptions and distractions took over. We start making plans, realizing time is beginning to speed up.

The good news is that we can look around and see new possibilities we never knew we had. According to the aarp.org blog, currently, 108.7 million people in the U. S. are over age fifty and growing, and 53.5 percent are women. We are not alone by any means. Amazingly, there are 36.02 million single households. If we genuinely want to do something with the next twenty-five, forty, or fifty years, we need to be willing to get out of the house and meet others in our “tribe.”

Blocks, Books, and Bricks

Think about it: our experiences pile one on top of the other for our entire lives like building blocks. They create for us an entire “library” of knowledgeable events (how to do things), good and bad. We cannot actually go back in history and re-do our lives. But we can go forward, call on our learning episodes and make things new and different. Ready? Start here:

• Lifelong Learning - always beneficial and fun, we can choose something to learn or participate in doing. Local colleges provide a regular schedule of one-time classes.
• Travel Groups – now that the pandemic is slowing and travel reservations are opening again (get fully vaccinated to make things safer), how many of the fifty U. S. states have we seen? How about that foreign country we dreamed of stepping foot on? Day trips are also a great way to see sites and meet others without a big commitment.
• Community Events – in every hometown, there are plenty of occasions to use our skills, learn new ones, or volunteer and make our neighborhoods better.
• Church Groups - just ask and get involved at church. They can always use our help and it is a great way to meet others and feel useful.
• Dating - please note dating clubs, organizations, and especially online dating, are not recommended by this author. They rarely result in any worthwhile or permanent relationship, are sometimes costly, and can actually be dangerous for the novice. However, if a one-on-one connection with another human being sounds good, get out and join with others in some of the above groups. They may lead to meeting someone with similar interests. And that is a particularly good beginning!

We Are Never Alone

No matter our circumstances and lifestyle at the moment, there is a way to make a difference with our days and use the gifts and talents God has given us. He provides what we need when we need it if we just ask Him. God is always ready to help and will never, ever leave us alone. Just finding the determination to do something with our lives that is worthwhile and beneficial is Step Two. Step One is placing our faith and trust in the One True God. He has our backs!

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7 NIV).