The Odometer Rolls to 90

Work, children, friends, lovers, spouses. . . So much is happening in all of our lives and it all seems to zip along a lot faster than we want.

 

At 90 years young, Regina Brett has a unique perspective on the rhythms of life and how to get back up and dust yourself off after life has kicked you in the teeth.  I have no idea whether I will live as long as Regina, but if I do, I hope to have her wisdom.

 

 

 

Brett is a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper and she says that to celebrate getting older she once wrote a column about the 45 lessons that has life taught her.  It is now the most requested column she has ever written.

 

I thought it would be fun to share Brett's insightful lessons of life list once more (My picks are #10, #13, #25 and #45).  Here goes:

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short – enjoy it.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and family will.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Stay true to yourself.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye, but don't worry, God never blinks.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful. Clutter weighs you down in many ways.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It's never too late to be happy. But it’s all up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive (and try to forget).

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time, time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative of dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. Accept what you already have, not what you need.

42. The best is yet to come...

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield (at least once in a while).

45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a "gift"

Amen Regina!!!!

That's What Friends Are For

This is a beautiful and moving story about a husband and wife and their love and respect for one another.

 

Sadly, the time recently arrived for one of them to say good-bye to the other.

 

In the following column by The Washington Post's Courtland Milloy, he writes of the spirit of the union between Washington Post reporter Lynne Duke and Washington Post editor Phillip Dixon in the essential phrase "sometimes yin and yang, sometimes nitro and glycerin."

 

Milloy is an awesome friend, doing what friends do best, offering emotional support and condolences to Phillip Dixon, and at the same time establishing that important and necessary connection to his deceased friend Lynne Duke, making sure that others know what a special person and reporter she was while she worked at The Washington Post.

Friends want to take care of you and provide comfort when they see you in pain and we should let them.  Sometimes they don't even need to say a word.  When I was with my friends, they let me cry, they listened to me talk about how unreal it felt and sometimes they gently held my hand.  That meant the world to me and I still remember those gestures of friendship after my husband died.

My thoughts and prayers are with you Phillip.

Photo Courtesy of Rodney Brooks
Former Washington Post journalists Lynne Duke and Phillip Dixon
 enjoy a Valentine’s Day party

After death of a fearless Post reporter,
her husband reaches out

By Courtland Milloy, Published: April 23

When Phillip Dixon called to say that his wife, Lynne Duke, had died after a long bout with cancer, I did what friends do and put myself at his disposal.

 

“What you can do,” he said, “is look me in the eye and tell me that we’ll get through this, that everything is going to be okay.”

 

A simple request. But en route to his home in Silver Spring, it occurred to me that saying those words was not the same as believing them. I’ve heard people tell mourners things such as “Life goes on” and “This too shall pass.” But I couldn’t imagine such cliches actually bringing comfort to a grieving soul. And Phil would certainly know if I were just mouthing the words.

 

He and Lynne had both worked at The Washington Post. He was a gifted editor, able to intuit what writers were trying to say and help them say it better. She had been one of the newspaper’s most graceful and evocative writers. In 1995, at age 38, she became the Johannesburg bureau chief — the newspaper’s first African American female foreign correspondent.

 

They married in 1999, soon after her return.

 

Lynne died at their home Friday. She was 56. The professionals at Montgomery Hospice had helped Phil care for her until the end. He was grateful for their service and greeted me at the door with a hug. Men, especially hard-boiled 61-year-old former editors like him, don’t usually reach out so unabashedly for emotional support. In fact, we guys are often reluctant to show any kind of feelings that might make us look weak or needy.

 

Caring for Lynne during her struggle with lung cancer, however, had helped Phil see that such feelings do not make us look weak, just human. In reaching out, he was teaching me a thing or two.

“Lynne used to tell me that I wasn’t ‘present’ when we talked,” he recalled. “I’d say: ‘What do you mean? I’m right here.’ Now I know what she meant: being totally immersed in our conversations, intellectually and emotionally, in the moment, in the here and now.”

 

Ouch, I was guilty, too. Being present meant listening, not just hearing. If you told me about a problem, I’d feel compelled to give you the answer — sometimes interrupting in mid-sentence, never listening long enough to know that you just wanted to talk it out, not be told what to do.

“I wish I’d gotten it sooner,” Phil said.

 

Don’t we all? But at least he got it. Some of us never do.

 

If anybody knew how to make her point, it was Lynne. Diminutive, 5 feet tall, she was known as the “Duke of Africa,” as fearless a foreign correspondent as there was. She’d covered much of the continent south of the equator — evading extraordinary dangers while chronicling the tragic reigns of Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila in Zaire (now Congo), covering the triumphant return of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, and then returning as bureau chief to report on then-President Mandela’s effort to rebuild a post-apartheid South Africa.

 

“I am neither an Afro-pessimist nor an Afro-optimist,” she wrote in her 2003 memoir, “Mandela, Mobutu, and Me: A Newswoman’s African Journey.” Rather, she was an “Afro-realist” with “affectionate concern for and loyalty to the African struggle . . . guided by legions of African people whose lives are built on extraordinary fortitude, unwavering hope and profound humanity despite immense odds.”

 

Most American newspapers no longer cover Africa — or any other place in the world, for that matter — with such passion, let alone send African American women to do it.

 

Lynne and Phil made a perfect match — a writer and an editor who met in the newsroom, went on to live under the same roof. Sometimes yin and yang, sometimes nitro and glycerin. Often laughing, sometimes arguing, always loving and fun to be around.

 

“I prayed that she would go peacefully and painlessly,” Phil told me. “This morning, I got on my knees and thanked God for answering my prayers.” He looked remarkably content, not distraught as I had expected, but like a man who knew that there was more to this world than meets the eye, that he’d felt the presence of a loving spirit when he needed it most.

 

“Everything is going to be okay,” I told him, convinced.

 

“I know,” Phil replied, smiling assuredly. Then it dawned on me: He’d known all along. Just wanted a worried friend to know it, too.

To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.

© The Washington Post Company