I’VE BEEN MILE-STONED

By Jim Kittelberger

I’ve been mile-stoned.  If you live long enough, you also will be mile-stoned in the middle of the sixth decade of your life.  It sounds like the horrible, I hope, antiquated practice of throwing stones at a person until they are dead or yelling a lot.  And maybe in some cases it feels like that to some people.  Milestone, the noun means loosely, that you have reached some age in your existence that is worthy of note.  The verbs meaning, which I am completely fabricating, is that each year in the guise of a stone is being thrown at your aged body causing you to at least pay attention to this particular birthday.

Is it an honor or perhaps a reminder to take stock of what has gone before and wonder what’s ahead?  In my case, I have been lucky and have had good people around me all my life.  Family when you are very young is that group that is always criticizing and telling you what to do, but at the other end of life, is a wonderful warm non-criticizing accepting place, if you are lucky enough to have a good one, which I have. 

I suppose also that when you reach a milestone you are expected to expound some words of wisdom and advice.  Yeah right!  I have lived three score and five years, but does that mean I have any answers?  I don’t think so.  What I have learned is patience and I have acquired a comfortable awareness and acceptance of a spiritual world.  But that is not something you can teach.  It is all around us and hopefully all will see and feel it sometime in the fullness of time.  Contrary to what makes good novels, I had a happy childhood with memories that never fail to make me smile in moments of reflection.  I have had the good fortune to meet some good people along the way who sometimes went out of their way to make my way easier with their kindness.  I remember them often and hope that when I do another blessing is bestowed on them in the great beyond.  I have been blessed with three wonderful children who don’t really know how much I adore them, but I do.  But the most important blessing I have had bestowed on me is my helper, my advisor, my companion, my most adored one, without whom I don’t know what ill-advised road I may have traveled, my lifelong friend, my wife. 

So what advice or answers have I accumulated over these years? 

Reject narrow-mindedness, hard to do, but the light that is able to shine in when the mind is opened wide will illuminate your soul.

Don’t make snap judgments of other people, because as the old, old saying goes, until you walk in another’s shoes….

And finally, be kind to people, as hard as that may be sometimes.