Thirty-nine is an odd year to celebrate. If we were still gathered mostly in wandering tribes and closely knit family groups, dependent on the hunt and kill to survive and hopefully thrive in the face of nature’s inherent unpredictability, I’d be mourning the passing of my prime.

With age and the lifestyle necessary to keep my people fed in the face of occasional drought and famine, I’d almost certainly be slowed by an accumulation of injury — shattered leg bones and ankles, scars that tighten over the vital joints and connections of a strong human body. The hunter.

At 39, during an age when human life was most commonly brutal and short, I’d be an elder, one of the lucky few to dodge stumbling mastodon, the sharp tines of a buck’s flailing rack, the merciless and almost always fatal curse of disease in an age before medicine, when the medical efficacy of chanting and dancing in the dim firelight while lathered darkly with a coarse mix of soot, blood, sweat and berries, was unquestioned.

As the years continued to mount, I’d become a hindrance in the field, a hurdle to overcome, and soon they’d gently nudge me out of the role that had defined me through a lifetime of struggle, anguish, and occasional joy. In my retirement, if the cold weather warmed enough to allow my agonizing emergence from the cozy, rank comfort of my hide bed, I might learn to take on other tasks — weave fibers into clothing, or basketry. Cave painting. Tool-making.

At the very least, I’d be honored for my experience and expertise. In an age before URLs, iPads, Yahoo Answers or Google, elders were the conduit through which experience and skill were transferred from the older, physically compromised generation to their fit but impulsive inheritors. The history of a people, their way of life, whatever religious inklings they may have harbored, these were the tools that made old-timers relevant and useful when their spear-hurling days were done.

How times have changed. Today we’ve been weaned on a false promise, the tidy arc of a human life that’s been laid out for us like blueprints to a shore-side condominium. The recipe is simple: You learn what they tell you to learn, get through decades of formal (and often entirely irrelevant) education, pick a career, apply yourself faithfully to a regimen of hard work and modest ambition over your lifetime, pile up a shoebox full of banknotes to supplement your thoroughly sufficient (and largely mythical) Social Security stipend, then slowly fade from center stage in those happily depleted golden years with your pink-cheeked grandchildren bouncing on your arthritic knees as your son-in-law struggles mightily to get a picture of grandpa with the kids before the old man’s warranty runs out.

And as our culture has outsourced the role of wizened teacher and mentor more and more to technology, your role in life when your career ends is more and more up to you. If you fail to build and maintain relationships, and isolate as so many do in their twilight years, you can find yourself alone and useless, burning a trail in your carpet from LazyBoy to refrigerator to LazyBoy to bed. Life has more to offer than so many years spent waiting to die.

For some, though, this generic life plan may have worked out. There’s always exceptions to the general rule of human experience. For most, we mindlessly totter along the preordained routes as far as possible before life’s Big Disappointments start falling from the sky. Maybe you fail out of school. Maybe your career of choice can be done a lot quicker and cheaper by seven-year-olds in a Bangladeshi tenement building. Maybe you get cancer. AIDS. Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Hopelessness. Erectile dysfunction. Apathy. Maybe the money you’ve religiously squirrelled away for retirement was lost when banks started robbing themselves. Maybe you never fall in love, and never had any children that recognize you. Or maybe your children just hate you.

It happens. We all make plans, foster grand ambitions, and believe ourselves to be one of the exceptional few whose plans will work out. But after 39 years, a long list of bad decisions and worse luck, I’ve learned one lesson that sticks: Life is a wicked major league pitcher with one hell of a curve ball.

We can make plans, should make plans if we want to achieve even a moderate level of security in this life, but plans only get you so far. The true test of mastery in this life is not how well you make plans, but how you adapt and succeed even when your plan crumbles in the face of a stout headwind and swells the size of your future Winnebago. This is the lesson old can teach to young, and the lesson that so often now gets lost.

As children, many of us were masters at adaptation, at adjusting the trajectory of any experience on the fly to wring the most joy possible out of even the simplest things.

At seven years old, Sophia Stem-Faulk still believes in magic. One day, she runs through the kitchen and dining room, singing and flapping her arms wildly up and down, a purple afghan cinched around her neck with a repurposed baby toy that was amazingly well-suited to its new, and funner, function.

“Dad, Dad,” she chirped, eyes wide and sweetly believing. “Watch this.”

She takes a step back, her eyes losing focus in concentration, and jumps several inches into the air while pointedly slapping her heels together. Her awkward landing quickly turns into a bow and flourish. Then, she pointed at her socks.

“My lucky socks!” She shouted, as if that explained everything. “They’re lucky because when you find one in the laundry pile, the other one teleports nearby so I can wear them both!”

Thirty-nine years into this life, with — I hope — another 39 to go, I look to my little girl for wisdom. She knows Santa Claus isn’t real, yet she believes in Santa Claus. She knows socks don’t teleport, but she still believes in the magic of her lucky socks.

I don’t believe that every plan, every story, has a happy ending. But I do believe that if we plan for good things to happen, sometimes they will.

And if, God forbid, they don’t, you’ll still have your lucky socks.

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James Faulk is a writer, cemetery worker and family man. He is old. You can reach him at faulk.james@yahoo.com.