Things to Ponder on Sunday

I dog-eared my favorite pages from Nora Ephron’s “I Feel Bad About My Neck” and I thought that today would be a good day to pull from a couple of the chapters.  

With every birthday, I try to reflect on what I have learned and how I have gotten better as a person.  I figure as long as I am smarter or better in some way every year, I am doing alright.  I do this because it makes aging a positive thing, rather than something scary and atrocious.   I also love when I can learn from people who are older than me because it is a logical thing to attempt to do.  I am not a person who is hell bent on making my own mistakes because I think it’s a stupid way to live.  I know that I am not smarter than my elders and that hindsight really is 20/20.  With that said, I still fail miserably sometimes—and this sucks.  The absolute worst is when I make new mistakes by simply trying to avoid theirs.  This resembles a car crashing because the driver overcorrected—it is the hardest way to screw up because I then feel absolutely powerless.  When this happens, I realize that no matter what I do, I will make mistakes and I am not fireproof in any way.  Life will still get you sometimes and you have to roll with it and move on.  This is hard, but it is life.

Anyway, I picked some of my favorite lines from the chapter called “What I Wish I’d Known” and I thought I would share it with you….

From “I Wish I’d Known”

• Never marry a man you wouldn’t want to be divorced from. (This makes sense for a couple of reasons.  You could first look at it like “I can’t stand to be divorced from him because I have to be with him” or because if you can see him being rotten and low in a divorce, he will be rotten and low in marriage.  If he is someone you could see being civil when you are divorced, chances are you won’t have a reason to divorce him.)
• You never know. 
• Don’t buy anything that is 100 percent wool even if it seems to be very soft and not particularly itchy when you try it in the store. (I am allergic, totally.)
• The plane is not going to crash.
• Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for at the age of forty-five.
• Write everything down.
• Keep a journal.
• Take more pictures.
• The empty nest in underrated.
• When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you. 
• There’s no point in making pie crust from scratch.
• Overtip.
• There are no secrets.
• People only have one way to be.
• You can order more than one dessert.
• Whenever someone says “Our friendship is more important than this,” watch out, because it almost never is. 

This next excerpt is from a chapter about death and although it is pretty sad, I loved it because she is so real.  She recognizes that even though we can’t escape death, we are still of afraid to talk about it.  We think we know what we will do when the end is near, but then it comes and we don’t.  She doesn’t really have the answers to these questions, but I marked this paragraph because I have wondered the same things. 

From “Considering the Alternative”

“Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard?  Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years?  Is life too short, or is it going to be too long?  Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses?  And where do carbohydrates fit into all this?  Are we really going to have to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in America is so unbelievably delicious?  And what about chocolate?”

Ok, well, the only things I have answered in that section is regarding the food.  I will never give up bread because I eat it in moderation, just like everything else.  I love bread and it makes me happy.  I don’t really like chocolate very much, so I don’t really care if I can or can’t have it in my old age because I don’t have to have it now.  I have more of an issue with Sour Patch Kids. 

You all know how much I love to ponder and I hope this leaves you with a little something to think about.  I hope that you have a great Sunday!