Satisfaction Guaranteed

“I can’t get no satisfaction.” --The Rolling Stones, 1965

Mick Jagger was 22 when those lyrics first crossed his poochy Brit lips. Twenty two.

No wonder he couldn’t get no satisfaction.

Satisfaction takes its sweet time. And nothing particularly sweet or slow happens when you are 22.

Now that I’ve got AARP knock knock knockin’ on my door, I can say with certainty that I “get” satisfaction. What’s surprising is the range of things that now satisfy me.

Like knowing that, as I type this, there are four extra rolls of Scott toilet paper in our bathroom closet. Four! Extra tubes of toothpaste and additional bars of Safeguard soap give me the same kind of kick.

As do the mornings when I wake up to a full Holt household, mornings that take place less and less frequently days. Nothing beats a house—my house—filled with contented sleeping beings.

I can’t imagine a 22-year-old Mick Jagger laying in bed early one morning, enjoying the sound—if not the smell—of others’ breath.

Satisfaction requires a long view, something most young folks don’t possess. It is at once both nostalgic in its recollections and Buddhist in its embrace of the moment. This moment.

While I’m sure that a 22-year-old Mick Jagger embraced many things in the moment, he lacked the long view (and, perhaps a last name or two) to be truly satisfied by that embrace, that woman, that moment.

No.

Satisfaction is not the domain of the young. It blossoms when you’re too old to have a bloom anymore, when our colors start fading, the spotlight has moved on. When we are old enough to recognize it for what it is.

Our reward for making it this far.