Recorded Books Inc. - Too soon old, too late smart: thirty true things you need to know now

Table of Contents

Acclaim for Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart

[Gordon Livingston] gets reality, which is how things are, frequently not how we wish or hope they would be.... This is not, in any conventional sense, one of those kick-butt, get-real motivational guides from best-selling life coaches. Livingston is the sadder but wiser man. He is more Job than Dr. Phil, painfully aware of lifes losses and limitations, trying to spare you a little hurt. He thinks in paragraphs, not in sound bites.

ROXANNE ROBERTS, Washington Post

Gordon Livingston has been through many kinds of hell and come back with wisdom and kindness that are to be revered. To read him is to trust him and to learn, for his life has been touched by fire, and his motives are absolutely pure.

MARK HELPRIN, author of A Soldier of the Great War and Winters Tale

The gentle, even-keeled warmth of Livingstons prose distinguishes this slim book of 30 inspirational truths.... Livingston offers the kind of wisdom that feels simultaneously commonsensical and revelatory.... Livingstons words feel true, and his wisdom hard-earned. Among the many blithe and hollow self-help books available everywhere, this book stands out as a jewel.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Life is a predicament, so read this book. Gordon Livingston is an experienced, not old, and a wise, not just a smart doctor. Listen to him and you will be smarter and probably happier.

J. RAYMOND DEPAULO, M.D., The Henry Phipps Professor
and Director, Department of Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine.

These Thirty True Things... are not detached musings from a psychiatric throne. [Livingston] plays personal warmth against steely professional insight, reminding readers that We are never out of choices, no matter how desperate the circumstances.

[Livingston] has learned most from his patients, from listening to their stories, from seeing the way they have organized their emotional lives, from the catastrophes that have unfolded, from their determination to put things back together.

SUSAN REIMER, Baltimore Sun

GORDON LIVINGSTON, M.D., a graduate of West Point and the John Hopkins School of Medicine, has been a physician since 1967. He is a psychiatrist and writer who contributes frequently to the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, and Readers Digest. Awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Vietnam, he is the author of three other books, And Never Stop Dancing: Thirty More Things You Need to Know Now, Only Spring: On Mourning the Death of My Son, and How to Love. He lives and works in Columbia, Maryland.

www.gordonlivingston.com.

Also by Gordon Livingston

Who taught me most of what is in this book.

Who, beyond all reason, chose to love me.

For the past eight years, Gordon Livingston has been one of the most important people in my lifeand yet I have met him only once. Neither of us is young, but we are the beneficiaries of the communication mode of the young: we met on the Internet, in an online community of bereaved parents. He and a handful of others were just what I needed when my child died, people who truly understood the chasm into which we were all falling, tryingsometimes halfheartedlyto grab hold and stop the fall.

There are no words to explain what Gordons steady eloquence meant in those days. It was a hard truth, unfathomable even to those of us mid-chasm, that Gordon had made this fall twice. I was blessed that I was able to grab hold of Gordon Livingston and his unapologetic directness and his embracing compassion. And as sure as his words were, Gordon did not preach or judge: he illuminated where I stood so I could better see myself and the world around me, and then he took that light and held it out so I could see the footholds and ledges I would need to reclaim a productive life.

What the years have taught me about Gordon is that it doesnt matter whether the fall is into the deep chasm we shared or more like Alices fall into WonderlandI am too small, I am too big, nothing is what it should beGordons sensible voice expresses a wisdom greater even than what his extraordinary life has provided. The essays in this book give every reader the window view that I have been fortunate enough to sit near for the past eight years. It is a book for which we can all reach when we need that thoughtful voice, just as I often reach for the folder in my desk marked Gordona collection of his e-mails and postswhen I need a voice that is at once stern and reassuring, hopeful but unwilling to proffer any guarantees. For he knows, as well as anyone could, that life will have its way with us and that all we can hope to do is to keep ourselves in alignment for the bumpy ride. He once wrote to me: All I know is what I feel and what I hope. It was classic understatement by Gordon; he seems to know also what I feel and hope and what you feel and hope, and which of those feelings are honest and which of those hopes are attainable. Gordon, who is also a pilot, continued, I hope that when the airspeed indicator reaches sixty that I can pull back on the yoke and the thing will fly. Ive had the physics explained to me a hundred times. Bernoulli was fortuitously correct. But it still seems like a miracle. And those words ring true because, despite his experience, Gordon has somehow managed to retain the faith of the innocent, the uninitiated.

As I read his essays, I was reminded of a trailer for a self-improvement television series: Your friends wont tell you... but were not your friends and we will. Well, maybe thats what real friends do: say the hard things that we need to know if we are to be stronger, better, more generous, more courageous, kinder. It might not always be comfortable to hear what Gordon has to say. He will push you out of the easy chair in which you expected to sit and watch television until the lights go outfor your own good, of course. At the same time that he warns us how little we control, he reminds us that we are never stripped of all our choices. Like a wise parent, he shoves us in the right direction... with a velvet-gloved hand.

Gordon and I come from different worlds, and on many things we have different perspectives. Even when we disagree, as we do on some thingseven some matters covered in these essaysI appreciate that he has expressed so cogently his argument without the rancor and incivility that has come to mark so much of contemporary dialogue. Andto my chagrin when we disagreehe makes the best possible argument for his side.

I was so pleased to be given the opportunity to write this foreword, to introduce Gordon Livingston to those who dont yet know his grace. And most of all, Im grateful for the chance to repeat to Gordon the words of his son Lucas, who at six was awaiting death as the bone marrow Gordon had donated failed to work the medical magic they both deserved: I love your voice.