Your audio-and-text option:
Listen to Chris’s story as you read it (below).
Chris sat in his worn leather armchair, the pale winter sunlight filtering through the bay window and settling across his knees.
At 87, he spent most days like this, quietly observing the world move on without him, feeling his identity — husband, father, teacher — slowly thin into history. He felt like an old photograph fading in a dusty album.
His great-granddaughter, Elara, four years old and intensely focused, sat confidently on the carpet in front of him, trying to build a structure using wooden blocks. She was a tiny, tireless architect. Chris watched her every move with detached reverence. Her tower was a feat of optimism, a defiant spike challenging gravity and entropy.
Elara leaned into her work, tongue poking out slightly, placing a small, half-moon piece near the apex of her structure. Chris, a retired high school history teacher, recognized the fragility immediately. Every great civilization, every empire, every human endeavor he’d ever studied had this keystone moment. He knew the physics of it. It could not hold.
For a suspended moment, the tower wavered, casting a long, frail shadow across the carpet. Then, the central column buckled. The structure didn’t crash violently; it wavered, collapsing into a heap of hollow clatter.
Elara’s face crumpled. A loud, wet wail of pure, unadulterated frustration filled the room — the sound of tiny human effort defeated by universal law. Chris felt the familiar, heavy pang of sadness. It confirmed what he often felt: the ultimate futility of all effort. Everything falls. Every life, every memory, every tower, every structure built to defy time settles back into dust.
But that sadness was brief.
Elara wiped her tears on the sleeve of her jumper, took one shuddering breath, and, without looking up for comfort, reached immediately for a solid, rectangular block. She was already clearing a space, already searching for the failure point in the design. She hadn’t been defeated by the collapse; she had learned a key concept: the importance of first selecting a solid cornerstone when building any tall structure.
That quick, automatic movement was the pivot. Chris realized he wasn’t watching failure; he was watching the unstoppable, beautiful engine of human imagination, the engine of progress, no matter how tentative and slow it may be.
His life, his 50 years of teaching and building a family, felt like that scattered pile of blocks — done, ended, complete.
Yet, here was Elara, driven by a biological, spiritual, and tireless impulse to create and try again. She was the forward motion of the world. Chris’s personal anxieties — the fear of being forgotten, the smallness of his final days — seemed to melt as he watched Elara rebuild her tower.
He didn’t have to keep going. The torch wasn’t something you held onto forever; it was something you simply ignited and passed on to others.
For the first time, Chris recognized his own myopia – a trait he sometimes leveled on self-serving movie stars or politicians who were so wrapped up in themselves. Yes, he was also only a speck in the wide, expanding universe – a temporary vessel.
But that was okay. His goal to spark curiosity and adventure and tenacity in the students he once taught probably was also burning in the grandkids of his students of yesterday – just like the determination he saw in Elara.
He was not required to survive. But the urge to build was. He found immense, quiet comfort in that fact.
Elara finished laying her first new foundation piece, a solid anchor. She looked up at him and smiled — a small, determined smile of a builder starting again.
He smiled back with recognition that life continues – and that is enough.
Also hear and read this “parent story” from 2024:
Go to “Roger’s Flirt with Expediency”
Age: Our greatest asset!
Jim Hasse, ABC, GCDF retired, author of “52 Shades of Graying”
Weekly Stories About Aging Well
“It’s impossible not to love someone whose story you’ve heard.” - Mary Lou Kownacki
Stories about addressing ageism.
Stories about handling ableism.
Stories about thriving during the second half of life.
Accolade: “Love reading your stories. You never disappoint.” - Mary K.
How to use “My Latest Legacy Nugget” resources to share
your “52 Shades of Graying” comment with a family member or friend.
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - birthday
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - graduation day
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - holiday greeting
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - special day
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - wedding anniversary
Template for “My Latest Legacy Nugget” note - wedding day
See all past issues of “52 Shades of Graying.”
See all past chats of “52 Shades of Levity.”
Check guidelines for your “52 Shades of Graying” Discussion Group.
Difficulty (challenge) in humans drives innovation and transformation.
That was my discovery some10 years ago when I first read Geoff Colvin’s book, “Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.”
He writes:
“... The most important effect of practice in great performers is that it takes them beyond – or, more precisely, around – the limitations most of us think of as crucial.”
For me, that describes transformation, change for the better that only humans can achieve through their own initiative by first embracing a limitation and then working around it. That takes persistence.
At 82, I just recently realized that I’ve had a lifetime of opportunity to show others, through storytelling, how to harness the power of personal transformation.
* What incident has given you the opportunity to marvel at the persistence of human beings?