March 21 – Living
Mike and the Mechanics had a song
called The Living Years. It tells a story about a father and a son. Told from
the perspective of the son in the years after his father died, you can tell
from the words of the song that he regrets having missed some opportunities. That
he let the tensions and frustrations get in the way of their love.
Most parents and their children
experience tensions to one degree or another. It’s just part of the growing
pains. Kids grow away from their parents and their parents have trouble understanding
their kids. Parents can feel like they don’t even know their kids anymore, they’ve
changed so much from the ways in which they were raised.
And it may be mostly superficial
changes. It may be that underneath, they are still much the same, that they
still hold inside the values their parents taught them by word and example. But
in their need to grow up, to become who they were meant to be, separate from their
parents, kids may be unwilling to recognize or admit to their parents that they
still have these things in common.
And, as the song suggest, it is sometimes
the case that the parents cannot bridge the gulf between how they expected things
to be and how it turned out to be.
Sometimes it isn’t until years later,
maybe even after the parent is gone, that the kid can acknowledge the good and
valuable things their parents gave them.
So it seems in the song:
Say it loud, say it clear,
You can listen as well as you hear.
It’s too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye.
The son regrets that the time spent
with his father was fraught with tension, he regrets that they let the small
things stand in the way of what was really more important, and far more
valuable – the love they shared.
And he regrets that, back then, he
didn’t understand how precious were the living years.
How precious is every moment of life.
We spend so much of it not even realizing that it is an incredibly valuable gift,
that every passing moment holds something that is sacred in it.
Life is ephemeral, in the sense that
everything passes. We can’t hold on to anything and keep it. We can only experience
it, love it, while we have it.
Ray Davies wrote a song called, Is
There Life After Breakfast. I heard him talk about this in a radio interview
once, saying that he had a dear aunt he liked to visit, who would say to him, “If
I’m still alive tomorrow, come over for tea.” Maybe she was excessively morose,
or maybe she was just acknowledging the preciousness of every day, not taking
any of it for granted but instead receiving as a gift whatever was given to
her.
And if she was given the gift of
another day, she wanted to enjoy a cup of tea with her nephew.
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