The Time of Our Lives

Last week we were in the Poconos at a lake house that someone loaned us. It was a great time just hanging out by the water, soaking up the atmosphere in a beautiful wooded and quiet area in the mountains. It was actually one of my favorite ways to take a vacation--settling in someplace located either by a lake or by the sea. Don't misunderstand me: I do like to travel, but in my book that's in a different category of human experience than what I just described.

When I was growing up, my parents and I had but two vacations. One was to Niagara Falls and the other was to Luray Caverns, although one time my sister and my mother rented a house on Long Beach Island--a house that has long since been torn down to make way for modernity. That happened to be a very rainy week, so the beach, per se, didn't happen. Instead we all had to find other ways to entertain ourselves. Even so, I have fond memories of that time.

My telling you this is in no way meant to be a "poor me" tale. I had a great childhood. I grew up in a small town with nice people, good friends, and with a safe environment for kids to have great adventures (not to be confused with Six Flags). It was, I suppose, as many people say, a simpler time. But who's to say what that means for any generation. When my father was a boy, it was an even simpler time, measured by the standards of my childhood--and so forth, back well past his generation.

I have fun reminiscing with people when the opportunity arises, but I in no way think that life was necessarily better then. It was what it was for when it was in the unfolding of the human story. The present generation of kids will have similar feelings about their childhood and it no doubt will be thought of by many as simpler and better even though that's hard to imagine for those of us who have gone before.

In Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, Self-Reliance, he writes, "Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events." As I understand that, it means that we each live in the time in which we are meant to live. There is no question that there are times that are better to live or to have lived, based upon the conditions of the world. But here we are, the people of this age who can either make the most of of our time on this plane of existence before moving on to the next, or waste our time complaining about how terrible the world is getting and criticizing any present generations for their new ways of thinking and being. In other words, this is as simple as it's going to get and will ever be again. And this is our time.