Enjoy Life's Little Pleasures

  A few weeks ago we found ourselves once again at one of Dr. Margaret's high school reunions. Her large graduation class has gotten together every five years for three decades now, and it has always been an event that we enjoyed more than we thoutht we would. The opportunity to share memories of a lifetime ago, and the life lived since then, with people from the same a background has a way of grounding people. We are able to reflect on waht has, and does, give life value.

  As more time goes by, it becomes less important what our status was in that teenage social milieu, and more important simply that we shared a slice of history --- that our roots grow from the soil of a common time and place. Those of you who are beyond " a certain age" may have experienced the same evolution. At this point everyone is truly a grownup --- gone are the days of fancy dresses and over-the-top efforts at looking younger, richer, more successful or important in order to impress each other. No more frantic shopping for just the right outfit to make us look one size smaller, or holding in your gut all weekend while taking shallow pleasure in the fact that the former cheerleader has put on some weight or the handsome football star is balding and gray.

Now the question is not who or what your are, but "How are you -- really?" After sharing the basic information about careers, children (or grandchildren) and location, people showed a greater interest in really understanding each other's life experiences and lessons learned along the way.

Wether the classmates were ones that we knew well then or simply familiar names and face from the past, the conversations tended to be less reporting and more exploring the whys and wherefores of it all. People who have stayed in the same careers were learning from those who had changed directions, and those who had lost parents were sharing with the ones lucky enough to still have theirs. Just inside the door was a table with photos of those classmates no longer with us, and of course there were discussions of how each of them had died. More importantly though, we told stories of what they had shared with us, and what we could learn from their lives and their passing.

Dr. Margaret had to tell the story several times of the death last year of her best friend since age 12. This was the first reunion that they didn't attend together, and it cast a poignant light on what is really important in life and relationships. All of this got us to reflectiong on a quote from Norman Lear that Dr. Patrick keeps hanging above his desk at the office:

Throughout the American scene -- television, sports, government -- the message seems to be that life is made up of winners and losers. If you are not unmber one or in the top five, you have failed. There doesn't seem to be any reward for simply succeeding at the level of doing one's best. Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach on triumph., one moment, then you spend maybe a thousand minutes enjoying it. If you were unhappy through those millions of minutes, what good is the thousand minutes of triumph? It doesn't equate. How many successful people end up suicides? Life is made of small pleasures. Good eye contact over the breakfast table with your wife. A touching moment with a friend. Happiness is made of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. If you don't have all of those zillions of tiny successes, the big ones don't mean anything.

Even though we read it often, this experience of reflectiong over the many years of our lives and looking forward to the lesser number that are left gives the quote special emphasis. We realize that life's most precious moments are a warm and funny luch shared with friends, playing cards with the family in front of the fireplace, or sleeping in two extra hours on Saturday instead of working on the book that we are too busy to get out.

Now we have returned to our over-busy and hectic lives, and we will likely have little or no contact with those folks we went to high school with so long ago. We'll see them at the next reunion though, and in the meantime will try to remember, as quoted from Robert Brault, "Seize teh moment and enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."