Today is my birthday. How old, you ask? I was born in 1943. You do the math. Since then, every odd year I get even, every even year I get odd. 2016, an even year, and I am feeling a bit odd.
You might think it odd to ponder aging. They say being old isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative. But I say there is no alternative. Growing old is the journey, death is the destination. Sooner or later death brings the key to unlock the door of your life and let your breath escape and blow free.
They say ‘age is just a number’, that ‘you are only as old as you feel or think.’ Of course, there is a certain truth to those old saws. It is hard for me to believe how old I am. I feel terrific. I regularly take walks, hike, lift weights, work out, and dance with wild abandon. Mentally, I read, write teach, and engage in bright conversation with the gems I have for friends. Yet, undeniably, I am growing old.
Those aforementioned platitudes are in some ways true but they are also the happy face of ageism, the conspiracy to deny the fact of growing old. As if eternal youth was a possibility and growing old was a natural disaster. Interesting word, disaster. It arrives in English from old Latin. [dis = against & astre = star] Disaster – going against the stars. Running contrary to nature. Growing old is NOT a disaster. It is not contrary to nature. It goes with the flow. No matter how much I would prefer it otherwise, I have more life behind me than ahead of me. More years lived means more experience, more opportunities to practice being human. And being human takes a lot of practice.
We know a lot and can learn more. We were born to change, to transcend our was and move toward our will be. That requires passing through time and time passing through us. But wisdom begins when we recognize the profound mystery that surrounds us, a veritable cloud of unknowing, a fog of ignorance in which we stand with the courage to be. Saying ‘hello’ to life in the face of the great obliterating ‘goodbye’ of death, that is the small and daily act of courage called out of us all.
A helpful meditation: to consider what you were and where two hundred years ago and knowing you are edging up on that state of nonbeing again. The return to invisible silence from which you came. A surrender to the source. What remains are the lines we scratch in the dust of the history of our time and place and the values manifested in our lives which become part of the living legacy of the human race.