I don’t usually make life decisions based on Internet advice, much less anything I see on Facebook. However, lately I’ve felt a need for a basic change, and strangely enough, Facebook has been flooded with seminal advice. Like someone driven to buy something after a barrage of advertising, I feel a need to get my act together, and this may be my last opportunity. I’m not on death’s door, but I’m definitely on the downhill slope of my life. I’ve decided to live this part differently from the rest.
Hopefully, with age comes perspective about yourself and others. Here are some of the conclusions I’ve reached about how I want to conduct what’s left of my life:
- Don’t drink anti-freeze. It’s toxic. Likewise, it’s okay to cut toxic people out of your life. You’ll live longer.
- Stop feeling guilty for not being able to like someone.
- Try to be happy. If it makes you happy and doesn’t hurt you or anyone else, do it.
- For God’s sake, have an opinion on things that are important to you, the country, and the world. If you lie on the beach and just let the waves wash over you, you will die at high tide.
- You can’t save everyone or change the world in one lifetime. But it is our duty to try.
There are a few people in my life who are absolutely toxic to me. I get physically sick every time I have any contact with them. Some of them are people society tells me I should love/tolerate/suck it up and abide. I’ve tried. For years. Without success. These are people who literally drain the life out of me, and I just can’t afford to squander any.
I no longer feel guilty for not being able to like someone. Some people are just plain mean, and I have chosen, finally, to walk away clean. You can’t fix mean.
It is not a sin to be happy. Nor is it a personality defect or character flaw. I would never seek happiness from something that hurt someone else. It’s not that important. And it shouldn’t be something that actually hurts me in the long run, like eating pie every day. I confess I sometimes drowned my sorrows in a Hostess Fruit Pie. My name is Janet, and I’m a fructoholic. No stick and carrot for me. My stick dangles an apricot fried pie. Too much of a good thing will kill you, but so will too much of a bad thing (See No. 1 about that anti-freeze thing.) I refuse to spend the years I have left lying to myself. “Pie is bad for you,” is a lie. It makes me happy.
We are an opinionated family. My daughter called home just a few days after being dropped off at college to complain about her roommate. “Mama, she’s just not normal. She has no opinions on anything! She thinks I’m crazy for handing out flyers on the quad to stop violence against women. How am I supposed to communicate with someone like that?”
How can a sentient being not care about what’s going on around them? If a mother refuses to change her baby’s diaper because it is dirty and she doesn’t want to get involved, she’s arrested for child neglect. Well, America needs its diaper changed, and anyone who doesn’t want to get involved in politics because it’s distasteful and dirty is guilty of societal neglect. How did the Nazis take over Germany? Not enough people wanted to get involved.
Many people refuse to do even something as minimal as recycling, preferring to deny the existence of global warming and resource depletion. And so what if Dallas, Texas has suddenly become an earthquake zone? Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with fracking ‘cause we need that oil.
And finally, we may not be able to save everyone, but how can we not at least try? Every great world religion teaches the same thing: help those less fortunate. It’s a sentiment that’s repeated in our music, our literature, even our fortune cookies. Seeing to it no one gets kicked to the curb, not our elderly, disadvantaged, disabled, or ill, completes us as human beings. How can you not care that some people are trying to legitimize neglecting those who most need the help?
I figure, if I’m lucky, I’ve got maybe another ten years of lucidity. I’m not going to waste that precious time on negative situations or people. I am going to learn how to say, “To Hell with you!” in many different languages, and I am going to eat pie when I want to.
