The Waiting Room

The proximity of death grows closer with each year, bringing a new perspective and a freshened sense of one’s axis shifting. Aging brings surprises — some wrapped in darkness, some in penetrating light. Each reveals. I have more pain and more clarity. I know I am more firmly ensconced in ‘the waiting room,’ hanging around for the final act.

Learning to wait has been illuminating. I had the illusion that I grasped death, but learned that each time I have a more vivid experience of it, I am introduced to a little more of its inscrutable nature. I’ve had my near-death experience, but this year’s birthday depression and a bout of chronic pain, made clear the uselessness of my life, and the emptiness of my efforts.

I discovered I don’t really exist because of what I do. For me, dying, this time around, made it really clear to me, that changing the trajectory of cultural life, of trying to make a difference, is not why I exist. These are not my accomplishhments, and it wouldn’t matter if they were. I am here not to satisfy, or meet, any criteria. The waiting room, enduring with the constant vulnerability of death, is about existing at a basic stripped-down level. I am not here to do anything.

To wait well is like active listening. Something inside is poised, like a cat about to strike. The chime of final freedom is about to go off, but it isn’t time yet. Waiting is a suspended movement, somewhere mid-way. Focused upon the inevitable, but not there yet. This is a state all its own. And, it goes on as long as it goes on. Enduring the formless, the obsolescence of identity, the substantial weightlessness, of being a non-being, is extremely corrosive and freeing. There is nothing but the moment.

A kind of radical dementia is altering everything. Focusing attention upon the moment, breaking the remaining bonds with what was, or what one thought one was doing, in favor of an awareness of what is unfolding. An opening is occurring, it isn’t a portal to another world, instead it is an aperture that reveals the current one like never before.

Waiting is like the beginning of a hallucinogenic experience. The world is slowly softening up. Things are flowing into each other. One’s sense of perspective becomes more fluid, taking on a disorienting depth, and effecting one’s sense of balance. Maintaining any sense of poise inside such an overwhelming experience is useless.

I don’t know how long I’ve dwelled here, I didn’t notice when I came. I think I have been in and out. Now it seems to be a feature of this part of my life, enhancing things and providing a mostly ambivalent clarity. I’m ready to move on, and I’m not ready at all. The waiting room is a mostly invisible landscape that haunts, besieges and reminds. I am not really alive without it, but hardly alive with it.

The waiting room gives me a place to ponder my existence, to view the scales, to feel the weight of eternity, to grapple with the essential mystery. Now, this seems like a blessing, a chance to sum up the whole. I can see the holes, the places and people, I didn’t give enough of the right kind of attention, and I can feel the burn of loss, knowing the chances will not come again, but also knowing that these recollections have timeless meaning.

I no longer have aspirations, or yardsticks to measure me by; the time of goals is past, now I think I am shorn of pretense. In essence, I am more relaxed, more present and available. This is the time when I am ripe, alive, and perhaps most nutritious. It is the time when I am here, but not for long. This is the time when I can offer the greatest perspective, and the most wisdom, as it is a time when knowing isn’t as emphasized as uncertainty.

It seems possible that the waiting room is holding me, while I discover there is even more to me than I imagined. The transcendent being, who is me, gradually comes, more and more, into awareness. I am not I, instead I am a gradually discernable placeholder, a facet of the Universe that is celebrating another expansion. I — no longer expresses what this being is experiencing. The waiting room just might be the final incubator, the place where a kind of invisible and effortless transformation prepares the way for a more profound change.  

Differing

“Our destination is to stand face to face,

feeling the space around us,

feeling our own powerful and unencumbered vitality, 

so that we have some chance of not being eternally alone;

 but different enough from us 

that we can never imagine him or her to be merely a part of us.

We will discover the Other to be someone familiar and someone forever new."

                                                                                                                                                                                  • Guy Napier

“…two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.”

                                                                                                                                                    Rilke

Being different is relatively easy for me. I was thrown in the deep-end right from the beginning. I was a military brat. I used to say that “every time I was about to become somebody,a a aa we’d move.” A life that included an advanced degreWe, 30 years of psychotherapy, a stroke, an impossible initiation, disability, old age, brain damage, and a passion for elder life, pretty much insuMred that I have gotten to experience being different quite a lot. It’s kind of run-of-the-mill for me now.  But, being different presents another challenge; I am having a dramatically larger difficulty around differing.

Differing requires me to show myself, to sometimes interrupt the narrative of the moment, to be alone, to reveal complexity, to become momentarily the object of attention. It is like walking before a firing squad. One doesn’t know whether an execution is going to happen or not.

All too often some form of de-humanization does. People generally don’t take kindly to the disruption that otherness causes. Worse yet, being different usually gets blamed for any discomfort that occurs. So, living out a difference is more dangerous than passively being different. This has caused a painful conundrum in my life. One that has inhibited and strengthen me.

Differing well requires one to care for oneself. Removing the conventional mask, and revealing the more genuine is hard enough, but having to go further, and reveal the way you differ, is a courageous and necessary act. It requires love of self, diversity, and what is. This kind of move enriches relationship, and sometimes throws it into a spin. Every generous act of truth-revealing, is one that can be painful. Sometimes honest differing generates real suffering. Sometimes honest differing leads to genuine connection.

There lies the rub. Intimacy cannot really exist, without differing, without revealing what may not be acceptable. For the old person, in particular, with each day driving one deeper and deeper into uniqueness, becoming more and more different, the dilemma of differing, grows more challenging. Aging means becoming more different. So, naturally it requires more self-regard.

It is hard to muster what is needed by some circumstances. Life is full of ‘damned if you do, and damned if you don’t’ situations. This is another one. Differing has that quality in it. It is one of Life’s many gifts, the opportunity to grow oneself, any relationship one is in, and the expansive profusion of Life. All you have to do is be as different as you are. And, be willing to experience the consequences.

 

 

 

  

Playfulness

“Man only plays —

when he is in the fullest sense of the word —

 a human being,

and he is only fully a human being —

 when he plays.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Friedrich Schiller

I re-discovered play when a friend of mine became Dr. Fun. He was an internet personality for years, and someone I walked with every Friday during the nineties. Later, when I had a radio show on KOWS, he was a guest. He had a barn full of games, and was a delight to be around. His laugh and his me/we attitude were infectious. He knew play was a wonderful way to encounter the world. He’s gone now, but for years, he helped me lighten up, and become aware of how important something like play, which is seen as frivolous, held a key to human evolution. This essay is a homage to him, and an affirmation of the role of play in the development of happy, healthy, and engaged elders.

Dr. Fun intuited what Dr. Peter Gray later discovered around play, when he found that hunter-gatherer societies, across the globe, organized theirocial lives around play. They learned how to share, how to communicate, how to value each other, and their existence, through playing together. This evolutionary psychologist could see that mammals played from childhood into adulthood as a way of becoming proficient at being the kind of beings they are. It was a form of instinctive actualization. More importantly, he could see, that humans became most human, when they had an adequate chance to actively play with each other. He focused upon childhood, which leaves it to me, to broadcast through these words, that play holds a form of social elixir that can make an old person alive and expectant. The joy of childhood innocence can, through elder play, be transformed into joy in old age.

As I have grown older I adopted play more and more. Soon it was evident to me that an attitude of play made my day a fun project, more creative, imaginative and delightful. Of course, the days of a house-bound disabled person always hold difficult challenges, but I learned, that as I looked to each challenge like a piece of new playground equipment on the playground of Life, I began to look more expectantly at my days. What a pleasant revelation! Now I find myself cultivating more fun, to go along with all the other attributes of getting older.

All of this unexpected joy makes me wonder, I’ve been led to believe that perhaps the best use of my awareness was to develop mindfulness. As a therapist, and a transpersonalist, I was taught that things go much better with mindfulness. I believe it, and until now, where I’m re-discovering play, I always thought it was the best way to cultivate presence. But now, I’m not so certain. Time, and experience, have made me think again, and you can see from the little table below, that I am not as convinced as I once was.

Playfulness and Mindfulness 

Mindfulness   • goal oriented. (calming the mind) • private • controlled (regulate and monitor breathing) • dis-engaged  • inner directed • most prominent era:  adulthood

Playfulness   • non-goal oriented (discovery) • interactive • spontaneous • engaged • inner and outer directed • most prominent eras: Childhood   (original innocence), elderhood (emancipated innocence)

Maybe, this is a specific age-development, one that just magnifies the return of innocence that comes with old age, but I don’t think so, mindfulness came out of monasteries and meditation, whereas playfulness comes right from engagement. Both have value, I just wish I‘d have had as much emphasis on play, as I had on the benefits of mindfulness. I think I might have enjoyed my life more — like I do now.

Play has come as a great surprise! It has restored my sense of pleasure in life. It has got me looking forward to the day — and especially new encounters (they provide new playground equipment). Life is now full of interesting puzzles, spontaneous joy, new playmates, and excellent fun. I’m relishing these later years, and delighted I’ve developed an antidote for the rampant depression that haunts old age. Engaging is much more fun than the meditation pillow.

 

 

  

Wyrd Aging

When I was a kid, coloring outside the lines was heavily discouraged. Later, wandering away from one’s career track was similarly ill-advised. Marriage and family were de rigour. There was a track one followed throughout, what was considered, a good life. Happily, things are a little more fluid now, but it is still somewhat dangerous to go too far off the beaten path. Maintaining some conventional cred is still important.

As a marriage counselor I saw how much pain and effort went into staying out of the anxiety-provoking weeds. Some semblance of the norm was important. Even the miscreants knew the pledge of allegiance. 

Weighing heavily upon most everyone was an unconscious cultural weight. There was a kind of reliable sense of reality that shaped most of our possibilities and identities. The cookie cutter ruled our lives, and few of us even noticed. Early human life is about fitting in, people are willing to bear the consequences, rather than face ridicule, disbarment, censure, and worse yet, being caste out.

Today, we still argue about reality, our politics center upon a fight over what is real, and therefore acceptable. Society seems to be unraveling because the center doesn’t hold, as it once did. It is a hard time to be passing from conventional to non-conventional. Astonishingly, life in the weeds, beyond the norms, way beyond the favored cultural assumptions of the day, lies the terrain of the unknown, the home of today’s elder. Political polarization is lightweight, in comparison to the disruptions that come with aging. Life, and old age in particular, turn out to be the really unsettling immigrant.

The nature of reality is no longer an ideological argument, for the old person, it is more of a slow-motion race with uncertainty. Falling carries the day. Old ideas of reality, family, love, identity, physical well-being, and what one is doing here, give way. The weeds, the unsettling tensions, the thoughts that have always been unthinkable, the lost opportunities, now become the coin of the realm. Even a new form of wealth emerges.

Too often, these changes, the shift from cultural assumptions to more non-conventional concerns, are treated like something is wrong, rather than like something is right. Old people aren’t breaking down, they are breaking out. The human imagination has been straight-jacketed by pathological thinking for too long. It is time for something a little freer, like the weeds that keep breaking out everywhere Life finds a spot, that isn’t so well-cult-ivated.

Old age is such an occurrence. It is a time meant to be more on the Jwild side. Getting grey and wrinkled, needing others, going more slowly, gazing at the cosmos within — these are signs — that show there is a more natural maturity available to us, then our conventions are willing to admit. The truly demented are the ones not enough fixated on the moment, and who cannot see, that Life is changing, as it always does.

We are living in a world that is constantly changing — defying our expectations. Aging leads us into an innocent weed patch, from which one can experience more of those glorious disruptions.

This is a part of being human that is much needed now.