One perk of advancing years is our accumulation of toppers. Let’s face it, three score and ten provides us so many wrong turns, bum relationships and general screw-ups we can excel when playing coulda, woulda, shoulda.
You won’t find the rules for this one in any game book. Masochists probably rate as the masters of it because it boils down to admissions of really dumb moves or the painful results of inertia.Younger people run out of things to lament just as we’re warming up with tales of misspent youth or lousy career decisions. The problem is they tune out or walk away about the time we hit our stride.
The longer we live the louder we can voice the thoughts of one friend: “I shoulda spent more time smelling the flowers and I shoulda trusted my instincts more, taken more chances, laughed more, cried more, loved more.”
One regret I hear and frequently echo: “If I’d stayed in the chair and finished just one page a day, I coulda written 35 books by now.”
When the area behind my ears was still damp, a fellow I knew found employment as a runner for a stockbroker. “There’s this company I bought a couple of shares of stock in,” he said. “You might be interested. It’s called International Business Machines.” But I didn’t even know that stock was a kind of flower, let alone a share in a business venture.
My misadventures in financial arenas could fill a book—and might someday if I could only stay glued to the chair long enough. There was the place we rented in Lafayette by a small creek where posh homes had blossomed nearby It had served as a rustic summer get-away. We’d just arrived in California from the Midwest. The owner in mid-1963 wondered if we’d like to buy the place, but that $10,000 seemed like a bundle for a house on one-third of an acre. Now it’s probably worth $450,000.
Some people believe they might have found contentment by enrolling in est, marrying someone else or becoming a follower of Buddha. On the other hand there’s Calvin Trillin. He said, “Maybe humans aren’t meant to be content. Americans seek Nirvana and inner peace and all that stuff, but I don’t think it’s in our American genes. If you want to be contented, you should be a dog.”
Shoulda’s, however, get sticky when you’re throwing advice. In fact, if you’ll permit me to offer this suggestion: Forgo the advice altogether. As Oscar Wilde put it: “It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.”
One of the sad shoulda’s often comes after age hoists one over the AARP divide: “We shoulda taken that cruise when we first talked about it. Now Myron’s too sick to travel.” You must admit the tennis shoe maker got it right with the slogan, “Just do it.”
America’s most memorable shoulda, coulda scene came during “On the Waterfront,” when Marlon Brando in his role tells his brother, “You shoulda looked out for me. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.” He won an Oscar in 1955 for his performance.
Some people get stuck in a coulda, woulda, shoulda rut. A constant focus on past peccadillos, problems or perversities makes Jack or Jill a very dull monomaniac indeed. They forget that they’ve made some pretty good decisions along the way, whether it be in real estate, departing a stultifying relationship or a job change. They shoulda remembered Samuel Johnson’s view: “The habit of looking on the bright side of every event is worth more than a thousand pounds a year.”
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