On Aging

I turn 44 on Friday. I have enough years behind me to see the wheeling seasons, and those turns have forged an emerging perspective on aging.  It’s no small matter to be able to look behind and locate events now two decades past.  It’s been 20 years since I returned from Japan, 26 years since I graduated high school.  Each of those numbers are spoken with some disbelief, as if the syllables prod my grip on reality.  I have learned to brace myself when I ask my friends about their children’s age.  Wee toddlers whom I carried on my back are now in their first year of university.  The days are brief, the weeks banal, but the years are vicious.

 It’s a symptom of an agist, death-phobic culture to bemoan the process of aging.  We do our best to distract ourselves from its sobering presence, or cloy our senses with pleasures and revelries, all the more to forget the encroachment of old age.  Our chronological age become more secretive with time, something to conceal from public knowledge.  In an agist culture obsessed with appearance, many women feel the pressure to maintain a youthful appearance.  Age becomes a source of shame and embarrassment, something reluctantly acknowledged, a topic on which we are loath to linger.

There is both tragedy and travesty in the way we look upon aging.  I am not responsible for my age.  There is nothing I have done, or could ever do, to be 44.  I am simply here, and the earth whirls around the sun regardless of my wishes.  If my age is not the result of something that I have done, nor the outcome of any domain of agency, then I cannot associate any personal merit or demerit to my age.  There is nothing that I can be ashamed of, nor anything to be proud of.  Age does not impugn or recommend my character the way my actions do.

 I have no propriety over the number of years I have lived, but I am responsible for how I have lived those years.  Our efforts matter and our labours mark the quality of our tenure.  Service, self-development, professional growth, play are all indications of deep engagement with life’s unfolding mysteries; they reveal a pulsing vitality that corresponds with the changing seasons.  It is in the application of my limited energies and passions, how I devote my scarce hours, that I derive comfort from my years, not from the numbers themselves.

 There are lessons that only age can impart.  I remember that night, the accolades and the applause.  I walked home in the silence of my own thoughts and realized this loneliness to be truer than the festivities, for the texture of my own company does not leave me after the revelers depart.  I remember when I saw in my mom and dad a frailty that was entirely new, a helplessness that eclipsed the unassailable competence upon which I relied as a child.  In that moment, I stepped up to the threshold of adulthood and became a parent to my mother and father. I took up the mantle of a love that was too big for mere sweetness, a love that includes heartache, bitterness, frustration, adoration and magnanimity all.

And yet, the quiet panic does not subside.  The terror of vanishing days only grows with age; familiarity with their devices does not assuage the anxious heart.  In desperate search for something solid, there is a temptation to pursue wealth, accomplishments and experiences in order to find steady ground.  And as the publications and awards accrue, you strive for just one more, for good measure.  None of these will ultimately placate the terror of what is is ultimately ephemeral, a life that will be gone, and all too soon.

Look again at this quiet terror:  It too is a voice inside that crowded tent where the soul undergoes revival.  The fear of time, as another valence within the suite of inner life, cannot harm or diminish me; it is merely another colour in my own unfolding.  Slowly, I learn to befriend this dark and moody stranger.  What are you trying to tell me?  What gift are you offering me that I have yet to recognize?  Steadily, faithfully, it beckons me to awaken.

Age points to the immeasurable weight of this day, this fleeting moment.  In subtle but stringent whisper, it says: Open your eyes wide.  Look in amazement at everything around you. Are you living true to your values?  Does your work affirm your heart?  Are you serving others?  Are you living a life that is worthy of this breath?  What will you do with your one wild and precious life?  I’ve learned that my ongoing work is to soften into these questions, to relax into their formative inquiry, and to let them guide me into greater authenticity.

And in the days leading up to my birthday, I look up to the clouds that sweep the evening skies.  Continental shores of altocumulous spreading across the horizon over distant mountains red and pink in the gloaming.  The scaly fragments glowing and curling into the moon, a finger smear of white in the deep blue.  The clouds appear without pronouncement and dissolve without trace. In the persistent emptiness of the great universe, their comings and goings signify neither gain nor loss.  In the vastness of the sky, there is a continuity that I’ve always been part of, and a constancy that transcends me altogether. Let the years roll by, let the hours slip away.  In the vastness of this sky, neither youth nor age find lasting purchase.  All that remains: sky, clouds, mountains, fading light.