Roddy O'Neil Cleary

The Most Important Time

By Roddy O'Neil Cleary

How often people quote the words of George Bernard Shaw: “Youth, the best time of your life, what a shame that it’s wasted on the young.” I prefer Pablo Picasso’s perspective, aptly expressed on a birthday card that says: “It takes a long time to become young.” Recently a friend said to me after recounting all the twists, turns and trials of her life:

“Why is it that just when you’ve finally grown up, you’re coming to the end?” Her sentiments are not unlike what I’ve heard seniors in college say: “If only I could start all over again. Now I know what I want to learn.” All of which confirms what I have come to believe, that much of higher education is premature. If education is meant to clarify the meaning of your experience, we would do well to follow the example of more enlightened countries in which governments subsidize public service programs that employ high school graduates for two years.

After this time, students may or may not go on for further education. They have gained valuable life experience and do not feel necessarily compelled to pursue higher studies.

Maybe the most important time in your life is when you’ve achieved the wisdom to know what you want to learn. Or maybe it’s at the end when you’re grown up, or maybe it’s when you’ve finally become young. The most important time in your life may simply be relative to each person.

I like the story that the author Anne Lamott tells about her best friend Pammy. Once when Lamott was obsessing about her own aging body and the cultural expectations of “beautyism,” worrying about whether a certain dress made her hips look too big, her terminally ill friend Pammy said: “Annie, you really don’t have that kind of time.” The author frequently incorporates lessons she has learned about life from the death and dying of loved ones.

One night when Anne was agonizing over her friend’s worsening condition, she called her friend’s doctor, hoping to get some encouraging news. Instead, the doctor told her to watch her friend closely as she neared the end of her life because, she said: “Pammy is teaching you how to live.” This is the same paradox that others have noted: By allowing death into our reality, we enlarge and enrich our lives.

Lamott describes her own spirituality in terms of “a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rags and ribbon, Eastern and Western, Pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink, and Jesus.”

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