I used to joke, about being an elder.
“Chronologically I’m an infant elder, but experientially I’m precocious.” I
still say it sometimes, because it still feels true. But now, when I say it,
I’m not joking, and I’m not exactly sure how I feel about being this way. I
looked up the word precocious to see what it meant, and if I was using the word
right. The word refers to someone who is “ahead of their time.” I don’t know
how this applies to a senior citizen, but it does seem like there is a way that
I seem to be ahead of my own development. I don’t actually know how to write,
or even think about that, but I feel like I have to try. I don’t exactly know
why. I tend to think it is presumptuous. It seems to me to be more than a
little precocious to write about being precocious.
Officially someone who is precocious is
supposed to be more developed than their age. I guess that is true of me. I
don’t think it is something I sought out, or feel like I can take any credit
for. Somehow the Great Mystery deemed that I had to go through a long period of
being perched on death’s doorstep, so I could be brought back, through no
efforts I was capable of, with a form of consciousness that reminds me daily
how powerless I am in life. If I am really in any way precocious it is because
I know this life is not my life, but Life’s life. That isn’t the kind of
knowing anyone seeks, especially if it means being held close to death.
I sometimes think being precocious, in the
way I seem to be, is a gift. I get to feel a lot of things. Sometimes I can
make this awareness useful. I get inspired and just feel awe. At other times I
think of this awareness as a curse. I have to feel things I would rather not. I
can’t always make useful what besieges me. I feel happy when I am able to serve
my community through this awareness. At other times I just feel grief, because
I know no way to digest, and make palatable, what assails me. I alternately
feel deeply embedded in the whole, and desperately alone, and drowning in an
immense emptiness. So far, it looks like both are real, they seem to
coexist, and I have to travel through them.
Being precocious is not my doing. I know it.
Life made me this way. I remember telling the doctor I had at Stanford, that I
always wanted to be special, but when he told me that they (the doctors) had
never seen a condition like mine, and didn’t know how to treat me, then I
realized I was special in away I had never anticipated. I feel the same way
now. I am precocious not the way I want, but in some way that Life wants.
I am simultaneously thrilled to be called in
this way and horrified that it means in some way that I am a freak — a freak of
nature. Being disabled is freakish enough, but being strangely enabled is
really freaky. I am not writing these words, doing this exploration, to
complain. I’m doing it to genuinely wonder what my being is doing here,
how does it serve that I am like this? I fear that I am a freak, some natural
anomaly, but secretly I think that actually I am the exception that proves the
point. I believe the feelings that assail me, feelings of incredible
connection, are part of what it means to be fully human. I believe that a kind
of emotional intelligence about ourselves, and each other, is part of our natural
inheritance. I think I am twisted in this way to serve to remind us all of this
aspect of who we are. In that sense, I’m not an anomaly, only a reminder.
Precociousness then is a memory aid. For a
time, some people have forgotten what they are capable of. The arc of
human development includes an emotional awareness of the fact that we exist
because something, something big and mysterious, has employed Life to make sure
we exist. I’m grateful that I get to know this much, I tend to think the crazy
reality we live in has lulled us to sleep, to fearfully forget what we already
know.
I don’t know what anyone’s purpose is for
being here. But, I do know that there is a purpose —a scouting mission to the
edge — and that each life is precious, because that mystery is embedded in it.
Being precocious is a tolerable inconvenience compared to that kind of
awareness.
I founder, in a very human way, under the
weight of what is being asked of me. I live in constant admiration of how
others have shouldered their own weights, and I take hope that I can handle
mine, because others let me see what they struggle with. If I am precocious its
only to remind us all that we have passed this way before —it is within us, to
know why we are here.
