Being Okay With Being Okay

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”— Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

What makes a good life?

There’s a picture on my desk that I stare at when I’m feeling a bit untethered: my granddaughter, a few days old, sleeping in my arms. Looking at the photo, I swim in disbelief. On such days I can’t quite grasp that I am here for this, that I get to be this—grandfather, elder, ancestor in the making. Not so long ago, there were nights when I wasn’t sure I’d be around to hold anyone’s child again, let alone my daughter’s. But life, in its stubborn mercy and gorgeous mystery, had other plans and kept me around. Now this tiny human, new to the world, rests, sometimes in my arms and always in my heart. I am overwhelmed by this soft truth: sometimes the good life is simply the life we’ve lived long enough to love again.

Years ago, a man I’d never met wrote me a long email. He lived on the Gold Coast in Australia. He was in his fifties—a builder, a father, a husband. He wrote because he’d felt he had failed catastrophically. He had trusted a friend only to be betrayed and, as a result, projects had collapsed, millions were lost, and people were hurt. He told me he was “a wretch,” “a perfect failure,” and “heading for invisibility.” He was unsure he could see his way to the end of the year. His note was choked with shame and resignation, written as someone already disappearing.

Yet beneath all that, I could feel what he didn’t name: he was still reaching out. Even in his despair, he was making a final attempt to stay connected to life. Even in the depths, he looked up and saw something of an elder, someone who’d walked a similar path. And maybe—just maybe—that guy had an answer. Moreover, in his own broken way, he was also saying, “I’m still here.” I wrote back—not with advice or a rescue plan, but with kinship. I told him that anyone who writes with such clarity of regret and the broken heart of a warrior was not a wretch. I told him I believed he was still a good man, even in the ruins, and to let the people who love him hold him. It was a simple exchange, a moment of recognition, and then time did what time does: it passed.

Four years later, another note arrived, this time with a photograph attached. He and his wife and their children were smiling in the sunlight. His daughter’s smile caught my eye, and his son, he said, was becoming a man before his eyes. “My family,” he wrote—a family he was still here to witness, to hold, to shelter. His wealth may not have been restored, his reputation not recovered. There was nothing triumphant in the note or the photo, at least not in the conventional sense. Just a man who kept living long enough to see his kids grow up. Just a man who stayed. That, I’m convinced, is success.

Recently, as he’s approaching sixty, he wrote again. “I’m beginning to feel comfortable with being OK,” he said. Comfortable with being OK—not amazing, not redemption in the Hollywood sense or even as I’ve been playing with it. He was just okay and comfortable with it. Given the harsh world, given the challenges that we call life, there’s a victory in being okay with being okay.

What if the good life isn’t about accomplishment? What if it’s measured in the minutes we keep showing up for or counted in the smiles we get to see? What if redemption is simply staying alive long enough to love and be loved, again and again?And again. Generation after generation.

In Reboot I shared how I was wrestling with the same question my Australian friend would later bring me. He found kinship in my own sense of being a wretch. I was trying to name what makes a good man, and why that question haunted me.

I wrote:

“Why are you so obsessed with this good man thing?” Ali asked, her voice tinged with fear and frustration. Perhaps she was tired of my groundlessness. Perhaps she saw in me what I often fail to see and, so, was upset by the stories I tell about myself and the questions it leaves me with.

What is a good man? Have I been a good father? …A good man takes care, answers a voice in my head; that of my father, perhaps, or, more likely, my Grandpa Guido? A good man, as I’ve been repeating lately, builds castles, slays dragons, and, if he’s opened his heart, tends the hearth—building a fire against the cold empty night so his loved ones are safe, warm, and happy. Hand-built castles and slain dragons give those he loves safety and belonging.

On a walk on a hill in Marin, thankful for the gift that is California, I met an ancient tree, toppled by age, blight, and wind. Stopping in my tracks I realized: here lies a good man. If, at the end of my days, as this current meat bag starts its inevitable transition to the Earth that birthed me, I can lie as majestically about the soil as this Elder, I’ll know that I earned my manhood.”

I meant those words when I wrote them. And I still do. But I can see now that I was reaching for something larger than manhood alone. I was trying to name a way of living that leaves warmth behind, a life that others can gather around. I was asking then what I am answering now: not just what makes a good man, but what makes a good ancestor, a good elder, a good human being.

Sitting in the mystery of elderhood, I feel the lineage of it all. I think about my father and grandfathers. I think of this man, halfway around the world, holding his love for his children and recommitting each day to the simplest and hardest of acts: holding on. I realize now that I was no longer trying to tell my life what it should mean but listening for what it was asking of me. By holding on, he and I both became the ancestors our descendants deserve. That is the redemption that matters.

For it turns out elders aren’t made by age. They are made by choosing to stay when it would be easier to disappear, by offering the smallest kindness to a suffering soul, by helping just one more person make it through the night. That is the living of faith, not by doctrine but by act—because as Thomas Merton reminds us, “everything has already been given. What we need is to live into it.”

We redeem ourselves by redeeming each other. We save ourselves by making sure someone else stays alive to see their son’s graduation, their daughter’s dance recital, their first grandchild’s birth, the sight of their child becoming a parent. If that’s not a good life, I don’t know what is.

In the end, the good life may simply be this: we kept breathing long enough to witness the next smile. We became the ancestor our descendants needed. We held on and, by doing so, helped make it possible for those who come after us to hold on as well. When the moment came, we were still here to say: I am comfortable with being okay. This is what it means to become an elder.