More Dancing in the Golden Years

I remember the last time my grandmother and I went out to dinner.

I was visiting after a business trip, and we went to our favorite Mexican restaurant. We both loved tacos and salsa and beer, which, looking back, feels like a pretty good foundation for a relationship.

Sometime over dinner, she told me her kidneys were failing and she was going to need dialysis. She had already made her decision about how she would handle it. She would do the treatments at home. There was no reason for me to worry. She was going to be around for a long time.

That was my grandmother. Here was some fairly significant medical news, and she was already three steps ahead making sure everyone else understood that she had it handled.

But then she said something I have carried with me ever since.

"If anyone had told me the silver years were going to be this much, I would have done more living and dancing in my golden years."

I understood what she meant then. I understand it a hell of a lot better now.

Because isn't that the rub?

We all think we have more time for dancing.

We think there will be another dinner with our friends. Another summer to take the trip. Another Christmas with the whole family around the table. Another year when work settles down and we finally have time to do the thing we keep saying we want to do.

We will call her next week.

We will go see them soon.

We will take the vacation when things aren't so busy.

We will spend the money when it feels more responsible.

We will have fun after we finish being productive.

And life, unfortunately, has never shown much respect for our schedules.

A plot twist happens.

A diagnosis. A divorce. Someone dies. A parent begins needing care. A child moves away. A job disappears. A friendship changes. Your body decides it has some opinions about the next chapter. Someone you trusted turns out not to be who you believed they were.

Sometimes nothing catastrophic happens at all. You simply wake up one morning and realize time has passed while you were busy doing the responsible thing.

The scene changes. The characters change. Sometimes the whole damn genre changes.

And suddenly the life you kept planning to get around to living would require a time machine.

I believe in good work. I actually like work. I think there is something deeply satisfying about using what God gave us well, earning a living, taking care of people, building something that matters and doing our part.

But I don't think we were designed to spend every waking hour proving our usefulness.

Work is part of a life. It was never supposed to consume the whole thing.

There should also be long dinners. There should be ridiculous laughter. There should be afternoons when nothing measurable gets accomplished. There should be friends who stay too late, trips that make absolutely no sense on a spreadsheet, cake when nobody has a birthday and, apparently, tacos and beer with your grandmother.

There should be dancing.

Not because we need to live every day as though it might be our last. Frankly, that sounds exhausting. I have laundry to do and bills to pay. Every Tuesday cannot be a bucket-list experience.

But maybe we should stop assuming the ordinary good things can always be postponed.

Maybe joy does not have to be the reward we receive after we have completed all our responsibilities.

Maybe some of it belongs right here, in the middle of them.

There are things in this life we cannot control. I know that more than I would like to. I also believe God is present in chapters I never would have chosen, although I am considerably less interested these days in pretending I understand why some of those chapters had to happen.

What I can decide is whether I am going to spend the chapter I have waiting for some imaginary future chapter when I will finally have permission to enjoy my own life.

My grandmother wished she had done more living and dancing in her golden years.

I think about that sentence a lot.

Because none of us knows exactly when the silver years begin.

And I would rather have a few more stories about the dancing.