This essay is dedicated to
Joanna Hernandez
and
Stephanie Lambarena
on the occasion of their fifteenth birthday celebration.
You didn't participate to any great extent in your birth. You were there in a mostly passive capacity. Somebody else did all of the work for your benefit. You couldn't clothe yourself, feed yourself, protect yourself or find shelter for yourself. Everything had to be done for you ... and was done by your loving family and a number of other human social institutions.
How things have changed. As I watched you last night, I saw two young women ready to enter the adult world.
You cannot remember how long you were totally helpless. You don't know how your family celebrated the landmark triumphs. You sat up, you crawled, you walked, you ran, eventually you danced. You spoke your first word, your first sentence. You were able to obey orders ... or not. You could answer questions and you could ask so very, very many questions, some of which have no answers. You could button buttons and tie shoelaces. You learned to recognize and recite numbers and then letters and words. Writing followed reading in your expanding set of skills.
It seemed to take so long. You wanted it to go faster, but time ran as slow as later it will seem to run fast. Fifteen years seemed forever, didn't it. How many days is that, how many hours, how many long, long minutes?
It wasn't always easy. Sometimes you were frustrated or confused. Sometimes it hurt. There were bangs and cuts and bruises. Sometimes you were sad but you were more likely to be content or even happy. Time flew when you were happy, dragged when you weren't.
But you grew from unable to clumsy to steady to graceful. You grew taller, stronger, smarter and more skilled, all with the help and support of your family. You were never alone. Your victories were their victories. When you stumbled, they held their breaths until you found your balance and went on. Last night they pulled off your training wheels so you could ride like an adult.
What do you remember of last night? Do you remember the few clouds in the sky, the perfect still water reflecting lights of the city in slivers of white, gold, red, blue and green? Do you remember the sound of jets passing overhead while the mariachis played and sang, then later while you danced. Do you remember the gentle sweet bitterness of the salad and its dressing, the toughness of the crust of the bread, the rich taste of the meat? Do you remember the laughter and the joy that surrounded you, the applause when you and your court performed that first waltz? Do you remember the heat and the noise? Surely you remember them. But for how long, another day, another month, another year, another fifteen years?
Who do you remember from last night? Get a notebook and write down their names, with a short description of each one. Don Ramon, Jimmie, your court, your friends, those who came from out of town and out of state to honor you. Record everybody you know, all of your friends, schoolmates, teachers, even your enemies. How many of them will you remember when you are twice as old as now or when your age doubles yet again? You'll want to check your list in another fifteen years, then again in another thirty.
Some of the people on your list will be gone, some will not. Most will simply be forgotten.
Your life is just beginning.
You've been told that your earliest years are your happiest. The next few years may be the hardest. You will have to make a life for yourself. You think you know the rules but those are today's rules. The rules will change. The changes will come faster and faster.
When my father was young, he traveled mostly by horse or on foot. People crossed the country by train, the seas by ship. Entertainment was reading a book, visiting the family or going to church. The airplane was so young it hardly mattered in the War To End All Wars, during which he was with the Army in France. People whose skin was dark were called 'niggers', a term we no longer find socially acceptable, and they were avoided, having their own society, schools, and communities. They did not mix with the so-called polite folk. What they had was not as good as what we had and we blamed the difference on them. This world was much the same as my grandfather's world or my great-grandfather's world.
I was born as World War II was about to start. We drove back and forth across the country in our own car when I was very young, depending on the fortunes of war. We had the radio for entertainment, especially on Sunday afternoons when the good shows came on. There were movies, especially the Saturday afternoon double features that usually had the latest episode of the current serial. I was almost ten before a neighbor got a television I was allowed to watch, a teenager before we had a set of our own.
During the early age of atomic madness, countries built up enough weapons to destroy all life on Earth many times over ... and we were in nearly constant fear that they would be used. Some of our leaders wanted to use them in Korea, an act many believed would bring nuclear retaliation from the Communist block. This madness was new. The situation was new. We had never before been able to destroy our world.
There were other forms of madness, too, such as the fear that the Communists would take over the world by rotting our minds with their propaganda. The Sixties brought mind-destroying madness as large portions of our population turned to drugs and alternative life styles. The airplane replaced both the ship and the train as the best way to travel. Old social distinctions, especially those based on skin color or African ancestry, started to be destroyed, little by little, in a series of small wars and court decisions.
One of my first jobs involved the space age; I helped interpret the telemetry signals from Russia's Sputnik, the first object humanity placed in orbit. Soon after that, when I was seventeen years old, I began to work with computers. The year I graduated from college, one university in the country started to offer degree work in computers. I was working on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific when man first walked on the moon. Shortly before I turned thirty my computer work took me to the Republic of Panama. My son was born about the time people were first able to buy or build computers of their own. Eleven years after that, you were born. By the time you first knew what a computer was, people had computers on their desktops that could outperform the ones that man first took to the moon. Or, rather, that first took man to the moon.
The Internet didn't exist when you were born, and there were no billionaires. There weren't six billion people in the world, either. The ozone layer didn't have holes in it that allowed killing radiation through. The polar caps hadn't started to melt. You were aware when we dropped a flat-topped little robot on Mars and sent it scuttling around looking at rocks.
The world changed slowly in my father's time. It changed faster in the sixty years I've been here. It is really changing fast now.
If you do know the rules of life, they will change before you can write them down. You will spend a lot of the next fifteen years trying to figure them out, as clueless as the rest of humanity. We don't know what's coming, only that it's coming faster and faster.
At the age of fifteen, my father was thinking of joining the Navy so he could escape having to spend weeks at a time chasing cattle through the wilderness of central Washington. He wound up spending most of his life in the Navy. At the age of fifteen, I was actively trying to find ways to avoid going in the military. I, too, succeeded in my quest, contrary as it was to my father's.
You are at the beginning of your second fifteen years, the hard years. Many people believe life begins at thirty. Where will you be when you celebrate thirty years?
Take out the list of people you made following your fifteenth birthday. Underline the names of the few people you remember. Mark a cross by the names of those you know have died. There won't be very many of them ... not this time. Lots of people last until they are thirty. Now add the names of people you know who aren't already on the list.
Humor me. I know you haven't reached thirty yet. We're looking at the future through my crystal ball. It's not a very good crystal ball, being a bit cracked and scratched, not having been cleaned or polished for a long time. I've been neglecting it. I think it also has astigmatism and is a bit near sighted. However, it's all we've got at the moment so we must make do with it. So pretend that you've just turned thirty.
Did you have a party last night? Was it a big party, with loud music and lots of happy, crazy people? After all, thirty is really the first of the decade celebrations. Thirty, then forty, then fifty. I'm not sure people celebrate birthdays after that.
Where are you living? Certainly not in San Diego; who can afford that? Was Los Angeles a prediction of what San Diego would become in a decade and a half more. Perhaps Canada, with its milder climate. There are still lots of places to build in Canada.
How many people are living on Earth now? Ten or twelve billion? Is it getting hard to keep track, with the frequent famines and outbreaks of tropical disease? Or have those all been taken care of, erased, eliminated? Have we gotten smart enough to limit our growth, to hold steady at only seven billion or so, while controlling disease? Still, that's a lot of people. And decent jobs require a good education and several advanced degrees. You need to study constantly to remain ahead of the changes, to keep someone younger from taking over your job.
Are you married? Have you been married, and how often? Marriage needs lots of work, too. Let your attention wander and somebody more interesting will come along to lure your husband away, somebody with a better earning potential ... someone younger.
Yes, this is the age when you have to try to seem both young and successful. This is the age when your kids will be going through school, learning to become adults in an increasingly complex world, a world so bewildering you wonder how they can do it.
Perhaps my crystal ball has painted too drab a picture, so I'll share a secret with you. You can be happy. Happiness doesn't come in a bottle or a handful of pills. You don't inhale it in a puff of smoke or inject it. Happiness happens in the mind, just as sexual pleasure does. Decide to be happy and you will be. Just as there is no situation that can't be made worse by feeling miserable about it, a feeling of optimism will carry you through trials that will break a lesser person. It is something you can decide to do. The earlier you start to practice it, the better you will get at it.
You will find that being happy attracts happy people to you. Your happiness will increase as you do. Unload unhappy people from your life. You know the kind, constantly complaining about the unfairness of life. Life isn't unfair to them; they are unfair to life, never giving it a chance, pronouncing it doomed before it has a chance to succeed. Keep the happy people, discard the unhappy ones.
It also helps not to look too far ahead. Don't ask what sixty will be like - enjoy thirty (or fifteen) and take it one day at a time. You will reach sixty (or thirty) without feeling a lot older than you do now. It also helps to keep active, both physically and mentally.
Another thing that helps is learning to read your own mind. This one takes practice and a special tool, a notebook or series of notebooks used as a journal. Write something in your journal every day. Some people say you should write three pages, a nice goal but not always possible. Write about where you are, how you feel, what was on last night's news, anything at all. If you can't think what to say, fill a page with ``I can't think of anything to say'' written over and over. It doesn't matter. Pretty soon your subconscious will begin to use your journal for its voice. It will talk to you, especially if you don't worry about listening. You can go for years without reading what you have written, but when you do start reading your mind it will amaze you.
Your subconscious will tell you what you really like and what you really dislike. It will give you ideas, usually good ideas. It takes a lot of coaxing, especially at first. Sometimes you will feel like quitting, but that often means you are near a breakthrough that will only happen if you keep going. Find time. You can always find time if something is important enough, and what is more important than finding out about yourself.
Which brings us to a psychologist named B. F. Skinner, who said, ``Anything you don't know about yourself can be used by somebody else to control you''. Most ads on television and on the Internet are designed by experts to appeal to something you don't realize about yourself. Governments hire experts to figure out which button to push to make the public react the way they should. You have to know as much about yourself as they know about you in order to survive.
And when you ``Do It Your Way'' despite their attempts to prevent your independence, just think how good that will make you feel. Being independent helps you survive, too, especially when you're older.
A few people won't survive to forty. Lots more will fail to make it to fifty. But if you make it to fifty, your chances of making it to sixty are very, very good. If you make it to sixty, you will probably arrive healthy and happy. If you don't make it, well ... you gave it a good try and are likely to be happy at whatever age you reach.
Many people say life begins at sixty.
You've spent sixty years looking forward. There is little more to be seen in that direction. Just enjoy each day of life for what it brings.
One thing your age should bring is inner peace. You've fought your windmills and, even if the windmills won, you know how to make them feel your presence. You've probably helped several generations of people make it in an increasingly difficult world.
Get out your list of people. Say a little prayer for those who didn't make it. Bless those you remember, because they gave you something for their memory to get you to this point. Don't add any new names. You can burn the list now, if you want to. Or you can just keep it, as you probably keep your journals, untouched from now on.
Relax with the people close to you and enjoy an increasingly happy life.