Gems at 50: Life is far easier when you just go with it and let it play out

After half a century of having fun, enjoying life, making mistakes, getting disappointed, surprised, angry, overjoyed, sad, and getting surprised some more, I have learnt much. But it is not as much as you would think. And therein lies my life lesson number one: No matter how much you know, you will never know enough.

Another way to put that is: As I grow older and wiser, I have begun to understand how little I understand ¬ Unknown.

By age 50, you will have seen some things, experienced much and maybe you will understand some of it. But all that you can ever see and learn in the course of your life is that which is in your own sphere of life experiences. This applies to everyone, obviously, as no single individual’s sphere of experiences can encompass all of life.

Which is why, and this is my life lesson number two, no one has it all figured out. Some of us greying folks pretend we have become all-wise with age and have much of life already figured out, but I will be honest. Everyone is winging it in this life most of the time. And maybe why that is, and I’m just spitballing here, is because there’s nothing to figure out to begin with, nothing to be understood.

They do say ‘life is not meant to be understood…it’s meant to be lived'. I can kind of understand that now that I am in my 50s, for I am starting to learn that life is far easier when you just go with it and let it play out; instead of trying to understand everything, trying to solve every problem, and trying to control the world around you. 

And this is coming from someone (me), who all through up to this point in his life has never been a let-go kind of guy.

So that’s life lesson number three for me: Do nothing, watch and wait, especially when you are stuck in a muddle. To do nothing when in a sticky situation might sound counterintuitive, but when you consider the fact that the more you struggle in quicksand, the faster and deeper you sink, doing nothing and letting things play out makes a lot of sense. You just have to trust that most things in life work themselves out somehow, and if you follow your gut, you will see that.

So follow your gut, life lesson number four. 

We tend not to listen to intuition. We believe reason beats that gut feeling we get from time to time. Then you get older and it becomes apparent that too many times over the years, your gut has been right about many important things where reason and logic led you astray.

So maybe now, after all those times your gut was right, would be a good time to start listening to your gut more than you do reason. But to do that, one needs self-belief. With self-belief, your inner voice is loud enough to drown out the noise from outside. 

Have self-belief is my life lesson number five. Self-belief is not quite the same as self-confidence. Self-confidence, though much touted, is externally focused, based on the accumulation of successes and it is hitched to external validation. Ergo, the more successes you chalk up, the more praise you get, the more self-confident you become. But failures occur in life many times, and then out the window self-confidence goes.

But self-belief is internally driven, not hitched to external validation.  It detaches our self-worth from our failures, and even successes. It is self-belief that helps you see that train-wreck failure does not diminish your self-worth. With self-belief you feel worthy whether you succeed or fail, or whether you are praised or not, and that, inarguably, is a good thing.

And what of any lessons I have learnt on the meaning and purpose of life, why we are here, and what we are doing?

Well, screenwriter Joss Whedon’s advice on storytelling sums it up for me rather nicely on this meaning-purpose question, for our lives are stories after all.

"You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are."

Do I believe we are here to discover who we really are? I’m not sure, I haven’t figured it out, I’m just going with my gut feeling that yes, we are.

But I’m only 50, and I have this feeling there is much more left for me to learn.

Advertising copywriter, fiction writer and column writer