Last updated on 9 November 2024
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“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Leonard Cohen
Five years ago I wrote what I thought was my own definitive manifesto on living. I called it Manifesto/60. I had just turned 60 and I was determined to live outside the way I thought I had to that point and live completely aligned with my values.
I wrote with such determination, such vigor, and, it turns out, with such hubris. I was as certain as breathing that this was the true way to live. Here is that essay: https://christianrward.com/manifesto-60/
Then I was blindsided by my then-wife’s affair and our subsequent divorce.
The precise truths I had built life on crumbled. I realize today that when I wrote the manifesto I completely discounted turns I couldn’t foresee and my certainty about my own life evaporated like mist.
No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.
-Julius Caesar
During that rough season of the divorce, I often would walk around neighborhoods for hours listening to inspirational talks and books and podcasts while I tried to put the pieces of me back together. Other times I wouldn’t leave my apartment, spending the time reading and napping from exhaustion.
What happened to me? The me I knew with such confidence and conviction? The me I thought was wise from so many life experiences? The me who was so resilient in the face of setbacks,? The me who coveted life and relationships? The me with the never-quit heart?
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer,” Albert Camus said. Instead of summer, I found a sad, cowering child.
Now, five years later, life is completely different. I moved 650 miles away to a small, modern apartment in a midsized, growing southeastern city to get space. I re-committed to my work and found it no longer supports the person I am today. I sought a mix of new and old diversions in an effort to connect with this new life.
All of this has been an effort to define myself once more. But the words I wrote more than five years ago as my line in the sand now seem naive and hollow. It’s just change, a part of me says. You’ve done change before, I say. I have faced down significant health challenges and job loss, even the demise of two other marriages and remained intact, even grew from them I try to cajole myself
The lessons the Universe was offering didn’t stick, their supposedly obvious and intrinsic value suddenly unreachable.
When they were little, my second wife and I took our daughters to Disney World. They liked to torture me on a ride called the Teacup. We sat inside this teacup-shaped contraption with one big wheel in the center my girls would voraciously turn to make the cup rotate around the others and spin in a circle. I always got dizzy and nearly puked each time, much to the joy and laughter of my girls. Think vertigo on afterburner.
Life just doesn’t care about our aspirations, or sadness. It’s often random, and it’s often stupid and it’s often completely unexpected, and the closures and the epiphanies and revelations we end up receiving from life, begrudgingly, rarely turn out to be the ones we thought.
-Kahled Hosseini
That’s a little of what the recent past has felt like: me losing connection with the ground, life buzzing past and feeling sick.
Things remain very much up in the air for me. I’m still trying to make sense of the breakup, trying to curate a new life in new surroundings. and I’m revisiting the components of the earnest but dewy-eyed manifesto I wrote as a wholly different person. In this new review, I’ve been rewarded by deeper, more committed and authentic relationships with each of my daughters and my closest friends.
It’s not that I got it all wrong. It’s more that I didn’t fully buy into what I was writing. It’s easy to be enlightened when times are good. It’s easy to pay lip service to life’s lessons when things are a breeze. but what about when it all blows up?
It’s easy to be enlightened when times are good. It’s easy to pay lip service to life’s lessons when things are a breeze. but what about when it all blows up?
In other words, I was gaslighting myself. The past couple of years have humbled me. I knew nothing then compared to what I’m figuring out now. Maybe that’s the lesson I was supposed to learn: beware thinking you’ve got it all nailed because life will test you in ways you will not foresee. I want to think that my recent experiences have schooled me, taught me important truths I needed to understand. Even made me more grounded and, well, wise. But I know better. Another lesson is waiting just around the next corner.
You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
-Paulo Coehlo
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Thanks for reading. Feel free to leave a comment. I respond to every person who writes to me. And if you appreciated this essay, you can find more essays and podcast episodes on my website at https://christianrward.com/