The best is yet to come
I was having lunch with a long time friend the other day, at a Greek restaurant in San Francisco, and he recommended the Duckhorn Cabernet – yum! – and I had the lamb kebob and he a squid salad. Delicious. We were talking about too many things to find a common theme but I can tell you both of us have crossed over into the second half of our life whether that is measured in the same number of units or not and so the underlying theme was about the other side even though it wasn’t explicit. He asked if I had seen Cast Away with Tom Hanks, a movie that I thought was one of the finest acting jobs Hanks has done in his career. Of course, I had. He said that he was haunted by that last scene where Hanks is standing in the middle of nowhere, in Texas, at a cross roads and he was looking out in each direction. I said funny he would mention that scene, I remember exactly my frame of mind when I saw it, I was in San Rafael and feeling like my life was not anywhere near the path I had envisioned for myself, and there into the frame of the movie suddenly appeared the mystery woman, the artist whose work Hanks found washed up from the crash. She was working in a large shed, doing her own thing, and driving a pick up truck. Something about her fiercely independent yet warm and welcoming persona made me identify with her and I soon afterwards began shopping for a truck.
The person you meet today is not the one who was here yesterday, I’ve changed. You might not recognize me today if you knew me yesterday. But my spirit is the same if not stronger than it was in days gone by. And the best is yet to come.