GOLDEN EDGES

What do you do when you are almost done raising your family? The last of your Mohicans is set to graduate his last year of high school and enter into the workforce! I began planning what I'd do with my free time; what my husband and I could do with the liberation of our sons coming of age. I thought I was going to be jubilant in recouping lost hobbies and beginning new ventures, and for a bit, it was rejuvenating my youthful exuberance! It turns out, that middle age doesn't always provide for the energy, finances and blessed unions that had forged ahead through tumultuous times and demanding schedules of work and family. We both found ourselves in less than agile bodies, depleted energy, and in a state of confusion about what our relationship had evolved into! Is this a foretaste of what empty nest is going to be?

Woodburning had always fascinated me so I thought I'd give it a go—turns out that I am not too shabby at that! Found myself doing puzzles like my mother used to do to try to keep herself sharp! She also got those Reader's Digest books to do the Vocabulary tests and expand her knowledge of words. Now they have brain games to do for memory improvement also! Who wants to spend their golden years meandering aimlessly in the world? We all want to be vibrant and enjoy what is left don't we? So we do things to strengthen our minds and our beloved bodies! Jenny Craig never struck me as an option. I mean who wants to pay someone else for food choices? Can't I just say no? Then there is going to the gym...even when I was a twig in my twenties, I couldn't do some of the stuff these fitness gurus recommend! Having CNN playback all of our profitable years, and seeing we were just as wrong and screwed up as all the generations before us—just made it all feel somehow ridiculous! I mean history really does repeat itself, just in different forms and faces!

One begins to question what their contributions to the world have been. The information age has decimated just about every single thing we concretely believed in, and if you still do; nobody else does! This globalization process we have shifted into hasn't stopped wars, created the Utopian society we all wish for—it just made confusion a larger concept! How many religions are there? It doesn't really matter because humans have thrown out everything that was normal, sensible, and productive...including traditions, common beliefs, and virtues. Mankind is emptier, more unhappy, stagnant and unsatisfied than ever before! I think the thing that is worse for this generation—is they now have no purpose or meaning for anything! Why go to work? Why bother with an interviewing process when most of society either has been convicted of a felony or cannot pass a drug test? What defines normal or morality? How are employers supposed to decide who would actually make a quality product in a reasonable amount of time with the least amount of cost and time—when the youth cannot stay focused on a task for more than a two-second break from their compu-phones? If there are too many felons saturating society that we now have to overlook some; where is our generation going to end up? Let us not forget the families...oh remember them...mom, dad, and child/children—working parents and kids who went to school to get an education? That is now an outdated composition! Nobody works, school is supposed to either teach how to adapt to multi-definitional families and sports is the ultimate learning experience! What is mom or dad, and what is boy or girl...goodness we cannot claim those titles anymore! A parental combo can be two moms or two dads or more....and they can be male or female or both....depending on how they wish to portray themselves! Where is God? I think they buried Him again...

It's election year, oh how are we going to decide who is the Pretty Little Liar, the Biggest Loser, or the Champion Survivor? Maybe we should have asked a Teen Mom to run, or a Bachelor, or a Kardashian and received better outcomes! Well my Golden Years are not going to be the stuff dreams are made of, and probably not my grandkids either...I will be too confused with the New Normal to relate to any of them! I may end up in prison for using the wrong speech or terms for what I used to think was normal! They called one group Generation X who started the ball rolling on globalization, and then Generation Y the Millennials who have no concept about work, money, or boundaries---I guess my generation will be called Generation Z...nothing makes sense, so we might as well go to sleep and see if we wake up and this is all a bad dream!  Hopefully we can Retrieve what is Golden from life while we are here!