How often did we hear those wonderful words when we were growing up? It seemed that every fairy tale, every story we constantly heard from the lips of our parents and grandparents always ended well,with the hero and heroine riding off into the sunset, their futures assured. “And they lived happily every after.” If only real life actually mirrored those tales from our childhood. Life just never seems to follow those youthful dreams we once thought were completely true and destined for all of us. Life is, in fact, a series of stops and starts, a pattern of good and bad, loss and sorrow, followed by periods of joy and accomplishment. Why were we never told that when those stories are parents read to us every night were just that, fairy tales with no prospect of every becoming true in our own lives?
The answer, I believe, is that there is absolutely no early way our parents and elders could possibly explain the way a life truly works to a young, impressionable child; with so much of his or her future still ahead of them. What if they told us how it really works, that life is a series of events, some planned, some not so much and that our destiny, while still greatly under our own control, depends quite a bit on chance, luck, the fortunes or others or simply genes that oftentimes predisposes us to illness we cannot control and most certainly cannot be described as “happily ever after?” Would they have done us a favor if they blurted out that life is frequently cruel, often random, cruelly unforgiving and most decidedly, not at all fair.? Would we have rested better in our beds as we dreamed of visiting Disney World next summer? Would we have performed differently if we knew the truth? I think not. Better to go for a while, believing in what we could not see and trusted to be true and easily grabbed?
So, we are left to discover how life really works, completely on our own and at our own pace. Oh, we get clues along the way that “Happily ever after” might not be completely the way things really work. The myths or our childhood slowly and inexorably fade; the Santa Claus costume found in the basement one hot July night. The “Easter Bunny” turns out to actually be your mother who tries to keep alive the myth of a furry creature who has never really visited or left chocolate surprises on a warm Spring morning. Magic tricks are revealed to be simply the skills of a talented entertainer and there really is a limit to the of wishes that can come true as they happen to you, if you are “young at heart.” Reality firmly settles in, like a dense fog on a hot and windless summer’s night. Before you even realize it, you can no longer can see across the street and the musings of a small child quietly morph into the truths of a young teenager trying to understand why that first date just never seemed to work out as planned. It was supposed to be “happily ever after.” Yet, it was not and it never really could or should have been. Life just does not work that way. And it really must not.
We grow when we are pushed. We learn when we fall down and yet, get back up again. We discover new things when we fail at what we first attempt and we recover from that terrible setback that we first thought would finish us. We adapt, we grow, we learn, we try new things, some work, most do not, but we keep on trying. If everything came to us easily how would we survive as a species? Haven’t the greatest accomplishments of our civilization happened when we were first displaced, facing defeat, thrust into impossible situations and yet, against all odds, survived? Wars, famines, revolutions and pestilence have forged an even greater and better people who were tested, tried new ways of doing things and then came out better than ever before?
Much like a rushing stream that races through the mountains, our life constantly gushes over a series of rocks and impediments that we call life. Our future is frequently a lot like that running stream. We race rapidly past the daily and unfolding events of our lives, sometimes watching them, frequently immersed in them, often controlled by them, yet certainly, as sure as the dawn of another day, we will inevitably reach the end, immersed in the glory of it all; a little bit wet, a lot more tired, but mostly content; because the true joy, as any stream would certainly tell you if it could, is in getting there. In fact, as it turns out, “Happily ever after” is not the destination, but rather, the journey. Live happily along the way, the end arrives much too soon.