One Thing or Another: Out With the New

By Mark McNease

It’s always One Thing or Another… a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

As another year begins and we make promises to ourselves, if not outright resolutions, why not stop and consider the changes we don’t want to make? The things about our lives that we’re pleased to have in them: events, people, situations, even qualities about ourselves we would not change. I quite like most of my life, and while I want to lose some serious poundage for health and vanity, I can’t say there are many other things I would change about it.

One possible benefit of getting old, aside from no longer fearing the word ‘old,’ is a certain contentment with your state of affairs. I no longer need to wonder what my life will be like in my sixties—I’m already there. I don’t have to fret over a career that, like myself, has reached its golden years, culminating not in some Lifetime Achievement Award from an envious body of my peers but in a part-time grocery store job that suits my needs. I won’t be climbing any more corporate ladders, or ladders of any kind, given the condition of my knees and one fallen arch. But I can still laugh! It’s one of the things I most treasure about this journey begun with a doctor’s slap in a delivery room and destined to end with little fanfare. I hope to have laughed from cradle to grave, and if my most fervent hope comes true, I will finish this wild ride with a chuckle rather than a gasp.

Between claiming to like change, and insisting I don’t like at all,  I’ve spent a lifetime undecided which is better—the old me, just as I am, or the new me I imagine will emerge with focus and effort. What is it about change that makes so many of us feel compelled to seek it in an annual ritual of self-appraisal? Are we dissatisfied with ourselves? Do we want a different reality than the one we inhabit?

This year I’m taking a moment to appreciate what already is. There are things I’d like to improve upon, habits I’d like to either cultivate or eliminate for the better, and dreams I’ll still pursue, having been a dreamer from the first time I opened my eyes and saw a world inviting me to join it. But there are many things, perhaps the most important things, I have no reason or desire to change. Out with the new! In with the old, the tried and true, the best of us as we already are. I think that’s called contentment, and it’s a perfect fit this year.

Mark McNease is the author of ten novels, two short story collections and six produced plays. He was the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors. He currently lives in rural New Jersey with his husband and two cats. He can be found most days at MarkMcNease.com