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.