Learning To Step Aside

I was driving to get a few groceries yesterday when this car jumped in front of me. So I got in the other lane. 

Before I hardly knew what was happening, the car revved up and then zoomed up behind me really fast.

It caught me by surprise, but my instinct was to veer away. The car then changed lanes and pulled ahead. I have no idea what he was trying to prove. But it was reckless and stupid. 

Why are people so angry? It seems that people are angrier these days. 

In traffic. In politics. In general. What has happened to cause such rage?

It's bad enough that idiots text and stare at their phones while driving. That's pretty darned reckless and many times it is how someone is killed. 

People are preoccupied. Everything seems to be about them. 

 
I've read that children are more depressed in this era because so much is done for them and they don't have to think for themselves until they reach adulthood. 

And then they are utterly unprepared to make decisions for themselves. What "helicopter parents" don't seem to understand is that you can't feel pain for your children. 

Planning their every minute is not going to keep bad things from happening. 

We grow up thinking our elders are clueless. That they are soooo old fashioned and out of the loop.

Then we grow older and we're no longer in that loop we thought we'd always be part of. Life kind of passed us by with its fast pace. 

And somehow it happened when we weren't aware it was even occurring.

We become that older person. That older person takes over our bodies. And when we look in the mirror, we look at someone with wrinkles and laugh lines and another chin forming. 

When did that happen?

It all goes by in a flash, doesn't it? One day we're in high school and we can't wait for time to pass so we can live by adult rules. 

And suddenly we're grandmothers. 

We step aside with our own ways because our children are now the parents. We might disagree, but we try to hold our tongues. We learn to live our lives on the periphery of theirs.

What they don't understand, what we didn't understand, is that with age comes a wisdom that can't be learned any other way than by the passage of time.

There is so much we could tell them. So much sadness we might spare them. 

But we have to let them do it their way. And make their own mistakes. Because that is the natural order of things in the universe. 

Meanwhile, we learn that stepping aside is a part of life too.