Well,
apparently, I’m 5’7. That may not seem
like a revelation, but for the last 20 years I have believed myself to be 5’6. That information was a part of me, a part of
who I believed myself to be.
As
it turns out, I didn't know myself as well as I thought I did.
Sorry to be so
melodramatic…it's not like I found out that I was adopted, or that they made a
mistake on my birth certificate and I’m really 5 years older (that would be the
shits, wouldn't it?)…but it did get me to thinking. What about the things I’m
so sure of, that I’d be willing to bet my hard earned dough on? If I was wrong
(or rather, misinformed by a nurse) about a simple thing like how tall I am,
who’s to say that I’m not wrong about something else? I could go down the rabbit hole on this one
and spend weeks just stewing.
Instead, I've decided that I’m going to take
it as a sign that I’m still not finished growing. At 37, I like to think of myself as “fully
cooked”, you know – I have all the traditional signs of being a fully inducted
member of The Grown Up Club: I’m married, I have 2 kids, I’m a homeowner, I
have a car, I’m gainfully employed, I have a 401(k) and I
take care of my business. But hopefully,
I have a lot more living to do. My learning
has definitely not stopped and I’m finding out interesting things about myself, the people that I love and the world around me every single day. Instead of being
filled with anxiety about what it is I don’t know (which I do know could just
about fit in the Grand Canyon), I’m happy to start out each day as a blank slate and
doing my damnedest to soak up every morsel of knowledge that is out there waiting
to be known. I hope this keeps up until
I go to sleep…for that very last time.
There is a silver lining here: Being taller places
me on a different part of that dumb ass height/weight chart they always pull out
at my annual physical. It means I have less weight to lose than I thought!
I
hope that whatever age you find yourself today, you can discover something new
about yourself and that it will fill you with the possibilities that life has in store for you.
Maybe you've got the height part figured out, but that doesn't mean you
don’t have a recently deceased distant great-great- uncle that’s left you a wad of cash.
