the climax of life

We young adults are creeping up on the climax of life, aren’t we? We are peeling off our layer of adolescence to the new, soft skins of adulthood. We are filled with the wonder of what marriage will be like, of what having sex with the same person who helps to pay bills will feel like. Our eyes are wide open to life beyond college.
But after the climax, after we have settled into our grandly large or horribly small yearly incomes—after we’ve had a kid or two and managed to finally pay off our college debts—life will be a warm fall day instead of a bursting spring one. Because it is at the climax of our lives—when the hill we’ve been climbing our entire academic lives finally starts to level out—that the terrain of life is altered in a non expected way.
We will have conversations with friends who are dying from this or that. We will watch as our siblings who have somehow righted themselves from the waywardness of their youths fill up with one disease or one debt or one spouses horrible accident. And we will lament for them, for their crashing and burning world… but we will keep on. Because strangely enough life is summed up in these small grievances, but at the same time turns out to be much more impressive and worthy of our hope even after these mishaps. We will see worlds in other people, other things, in our children and the familiarity of how our houses squeak when we pad down the hall to the restroom. We will cradle the frailty of life in the crooks of our arms and shoulder burdens far too large for our backs and sometimes our wallets, just as they were too large for our parents’. And strangely enough, we will keep on keeping on.
And when we have turned over the graves of our parents, when we have become the elder in the lives of those around us, there will be no stopping the snowball effect of life. Life will push through our sickness, our age, our broken hips. Life will push through our rebellious children and dusty offices. Life will consume our resources and weedle into our joints to slow us down. Life will and will and will. And one day we simply won’t. How do we counteract something with so much absolution?
My bright conclusion is that the way to conquer the depression in the things we will discover about tomorrow is to simply love more of what we can’t control today.