What’s So Good About Getting Older?

The supreme reward of growing older might be

 

“our widening capacity for patience,

for the spaciousness that meets life on its own terms

and becomes one with the unfolding mystery.”

                                                                                                               Kahlil Gibran

I was introduced to being older by my stroke. I jokingly said at the time, that I was aged from 55 to 95 in about 4 years. Now, at 75 I no longer think that was a joke. My interest in aging has grown over the years. It has led me to, and through, a lot of things, and a lot of relationships with older people. Plus, in the meantime, I’ve become one of them. All of that experience has sharpened my interest in this particular era of Life. I think it holds some unique attributes, that make the final laps around the track, some of the most meaningful and important stages of Life.

In the early years after my stroke, I used to regard myself as a ‘precocious elder.’ I became one early (before my 60’s), but aging has made it really clear that I still had a lot to learn about what getting older involves. The last few years I‘ve had the feeling that this stage of my life is unlike any I’ve experienced before, and certainly more compelling. Everything up till now has been important, and involving, but this last phase of life, is having the effect of bringing it all together. I am turning out to be familiar and unknown, an unfolding mystery, like Gibran says.

The feeling of being old, and new again, is somewhat disorienting. I am surprised by what I regularly forget, and by what I amazingly remember. I experience déjà vu a lot, and then I’m struck by the beauty of some formerly pedestrian event. It is as if I’m a child again. Older and wiser, and even more sensitive and open. Moments last longer, strike me deeper, and more regularly blow away my pretenses. I am not what I used to be, and am on the way to what I have always been. I am broken down, frailer than I’ve ever been, and somehow more spiritually alive. I no longer believe death isn’t coming for me, but strangely, I am more welcoming than ever.

Letting go has become a big thing in my later life. I have an ambivalent relationship with it. I hate having to get rid of stuff, the shedding of identity, that comes with a life careening toward the finish line. I’m not finished yet, and I’m more finished than I’ve ever been. Getting rid of myself is an inexplicable way of finishing. I am ready to move on. And already I’m living as a ghost of myself. There is the pain of loss and surrender, and the joy of freedom. This is a bittersweet brew, that had to steep a lifetime, to be aged properly, so that the paradoxical flavors of simplicity and complexity could blossom.

I am the penultimate result of a lifetime of human longing. Aged with care, and just another one of a host that are passing quickly. It is some kind of demented race to a finishing line that one never sees coming. Sometimes gone even before one starts. The metaphor of a journey doesn’t begin to describe the weirdness baked into this transition. Thank the Mystery, Nature had the sense to create a beginning and ending.

Unlike other eras in life, the uniqueness of old age is how palpable is the ripening that takes place. No matter what one’s circumstances are: rich or poor, privileged or not, disabled, demented, savvy or naïve, this is an equal-opportunity action, that is imposed on all of us by nature. It puts everyone through the wringer. And it squeezes out of us our truest nature. That is a late-life gift that makes all the ups and downs precious.