As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness -- just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.
Nov 10, 2023·edited Nov 10, 2023Liked by Serge Bielanko
Is it the province of those who’ve found love unexpectedly in middle age (again I use that word somewhat prosaically) to imagine what it would have been like to have met this love earlier in life? Before life got to us and took our hairlines and waistlines and naïveté and innocence? Before life took our teenaged sexual stamina? Before life _____? Maybe. Maybe that’s comes with later in life love. Wanting to have been part of our love’s past. To have been THE ONE. The only one? The first? To have shared forty years rather than ____? To have had that history. But if so what would our lives be today? The same? Better? Worse? Different, that’s for sure. Our kids would be other. Not who they are, but some crazy mashup of you and her, not recognizable to 2023 us. Would I have three? Or would one have been the limit? I know my wife would have done the best she could, be she never had kids and would have been stressed and resentful and at the end of her rope AF. Sadly, she’s not a kid person. So her having not having kids was a good thing. But I always wanted kids, so what would have been? Still, I’ve played the “what if” game and run the scenarios of how I’d have made her life better and she’d have been my one and only great love and blah blah blah. Even though I know. My wife is only four years younger than me and grew up the next town over and knew a lot of people I knew, so it’s not so beyond the realm of possibility that we could have met once upon a long ago, at, say 18 and 22.
See, once again, you’ve triggered my thought process. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not alone in my imaginings/wonderings/fantasies of a love out of time that might have been. But, to quote John Lennon, “there’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where to you’re meant to be…”
Thanks, as always, for the musings. Have a good week!
Is it the province of those who’ve found love unexpectedly in middle age (again I use that word somewhat prosaically) to imagine what it would have been like to have met this love earlier in life? Before life got to us and took our hairlines and waistlines and naïveté and innocence? Before life took our teenaged sexual stamina? Before life _____? Maybe. Maybe that’s comes with later in life love. Wanting to have been part of our love’s past. To have been THE ONE. The only one? The first? To have shared forty years rather than ____? To have had that history. But if so what would our lives be today? The same? Better? Worse? Different, that’s for sure. Our kids would be other. Not who they are, but some crazy mashup of you and her, not recognizable to 2023 us. Would I have three? Or would one have been the limit? I know my wife would have done the best she could, be she never had kids and would have been stressed and resentful and at the end of her rope AF. Sadly, she’s not a kid person. So her having not having kids was a good thing. But I always wanted kids, so what would have been? Still, I’ve played the “what if” game and run the scenarios of how I’d have made her life better and she’d have been my one and only great love and blah blah blah. Even though I know. My wife is only four years younger than me and grew up the next town over and knew a lot of people I knew, so it’s not so beyond the realm of possibility that we could have met once upon a long ago, at, say 18 and 22.
See, once again, you’ve triggered my thought process. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not alone in my imaginings/wonderings/fantasies of a love out of time that might have been. But, to quote John Lennon, “there’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where to you’re meant to be…”
Thanks, as always, for the musings. Have a good week!
PS. That quote from LIW is spot f’n on.