Growing up or growing old

By Randy Knapp

I know I’m growing older because every morning it takes a little longer to work the kinks out of my lower back and my injured ankle. I used to think that growing older was part of a natural process of maturation, but I’m not sure it’s making me any smarter. I guess the real question is, as I’m growing older, am I growing up?

Just yesterday my two boys taught me a couple of important lessons about growing up.

I was sitting at my desk preparing for the day’s activities when my youngest son, Corey, came over and sat down in a chair adjacent to me. I looked up from my task and greeted him with, “Whazzz up?” He said that he had decided he was going to stop being “right” so much when he was involved in conversations with his friends. He was frustrated that their discussions degenerated so often into arguments that left both himself and his friends upset. Being “right” didn’t seem to help much. The implication was that he was going to do more listening than pushing the “rightness” of his own points. I think the world needs more listeners. Maybe I should be “right” a little less often.

Later that night, my son Brady got home from a trip to Texas. As we were trading texts and phone calls about his flights and delays during the day, he hinted that he had a cool story to tell me when he got back to Medford. His plane landed on time, but forty-five minutes later we determined that his luggage was still in Los Angeles, CA.

Undaunted by the inconvenience, he began to tell me his “cool” story. “Have you read No Shortcuts To The Top, by Ed Viestures,” he asked? (Note: It is a book about the first American mountaineer to reach the summits of all fourteen 8,000 meter peaks in the Himalayas and the Karakoram without bottled oxygen.) I told him that it was one of my favorite books and I had listened to it many times on my IPOD. Brady had purchased the book in Texas and had read several chapters. He said that in reading the story about Ed’s early climbing history, he was reminded of the stories of my early climbs. He knew that I had summited most of the northwest mountains Ed had climbed a couple of years before he moved to the area to start his mountaineering career.

Even though the words were not said, I know that my son, who was two thousand miles away from his dad, felt a need to connect, so he bought a book about my life-long passion and found glimpses of me in the pages.

So, next time I’m feeling lonely I need to reconnect with a friend, and instead of telling them my story, take some time instead to listen to theirs.

I think I’ll stop writing for now. I am feeling a strong need to reconnect with my Heavenly Daddy. There’s a book I enjoy reading that tells some great stories about Him.

Randy writes from Medford, OR. You can contact him at knappsnest@msn.com.