Introduction: Seventy-Five Years of Lessons

Another Get the King out of the Garden

At seventy-five, a person starts to see life in longer lines instead of short bursts. You stop looking at the isolated events, such as the job you held, the storm you lived through, the arguments you won or lost, and you start seeing some of the patterns underneath. You begin to understand why people acted the way they did, why certain choices mattered, and others didn’t, and how the smallest habits ended up shaping an entire lifetime.

I really never set out to collect wisdom. Most of my life was spent working, raising a family, fixing what was broken, and doing what needed to be done. I’ve lived through good years and hard ones, through changes that came slow as a sunrise and others that hit like a hammer. I’ve worked in fields, in homes, on buildings, and in situations where results really mattered more than comfort. Across all that time, life taught its lessons quietly, sometimes gently, sometimes not quite so gently.

This series isn’t a memoir or a detailed life story. It isn’t a confession. And it certainly isn’t a list of how-to instructions for living. It’s simply a gathering of the things that are proved true, again and again, through work, marriage, family, community, loss, aging, and the surprising corners of consciousness that show up when you least expect them.

I won’t be sharing every private detail. Some stories belong only to the people who lived them. But the lessons they taught me are worth passing along. I hope that something here helps you understand your own life a little better, or at least reminds you that the path from youth to old age is both harder and better than anyone can explain ahead of time. Just remember, your life is not over when you take your last breath. Life is eternal, and the best is yet to be lived if one but shows loving kindness to those put in their paths, even when it’s hard to do.

If the first seventy-five years have taught me anything, it’s this:
Life is a teacher, whether you’re paying attention or not.
These pages are simply my attempt to pay more attention, its really more about helping me to remember this than about anyone else.

www.getthekingoutofthegarden stores the collections.

A reminder is that the title Get the king out of the Garden was from a dream I recently had, that upon waking, I heard that phrase. It’s more about if you have something that needs to be done or said, don’t spend idle time doing things that just take time away from those things. Life is too short to wait and say I will tell them this later, but not now, as later may just never come. If the King of a country spent all day in his beautiful garden while letting the kingdom go unattended and acknowledging those who help him, then that kingdom would be sure to deteriorate.