Over the past couple of years I have heard in variations of the following sentiment: "You are too old."
Most of the time these sentiments were offered in ways to blunt the sting, but the thought was the same,
"Why are you building a house at your age?"
"You can't make a mistake at your age."
"It is good to see your enthusiasm at this point in your career."
On and on.
So I stepped back from my life and wondered about what I had ahead. The past 6+ decades have been adventurous, and hard, and rewarding, and disappointing, you get the drift. We have had good times and tough times, but we have moved forward with dreams of the next portion of the journey.
And then the comments above. What does my life look like without a dream or goal? Have I accomplished all that I can accomplish? At what point do I leave behind me the idea that there is not a new horizon? I remember my dad telling me about his grandfather who came to live with them on the farm and Dad's recalling of his granddad's time there was spent in the shade whittling. Finished with work, with responsibility, with life.
And the world conspires to shut us down, to move us to the side. Even our own bodies don't function like they used to. I spoke to a friend of mine recently about this very thing. He seemed a little more adjusted to the idea than I was. When I recounted that working in the Patch I couldn't really work as hard as I used to, or as long, or accomplish the same things, he said something like, "That's the way it works". My response was that it just made me mad. Mad at myself, mad at my older body, mad at the way this was robbing me of the things I like to do. There seems to be a lot of shaking my fist at fate and time.
But I heard a line from a sermon months ago and wrote it down and studied it for a long time. Dreaming Life Forward. In my life the true indicator of old age is the setting aside of dreams. Of living a life of existence, not acting and moving towards dreams and desires and goals and life. My bride has put up with a life of me having dreams and following them, a lot of the time at her expense. Getting my college degree a day before my oldest child graduated from college. Then on to a Masters because I was fascinated with the idea of resolving conflict. Taking risks on jobs that were more building than rewarding. Dreaming and dreaming and dreaming. Some fulfilled, most not. But it has pulled my life forward.
Then I read a passage in a book by Barbara Brown Taylor called Learning to Walk in the Dark,
"With the gravitas that arrives when life is more than half over, people at this age are ready to spend and be spent, emptying their pockets in one last-ditch effort to make meaning." The emphasis is mine.
My dad is 95, soon to be 96. If any of those longevity genes are in my makeup I have roughly a third of my life left to live. To LIVE.
At the end of a little known movie called Second Hand Lions, the story wraps up after stories of battles won, riches gained, of love found and lost. Not knowing what was real and what was embellishment. The son of the antagonist of the two brothers from their fanciful stories shows up and comments to the boy the old brothers have taken in, "I just wanted to see if they really lived."
To which the now grown boy relies, "Yes, they really lived." What better epitaph? Yes, He really lived.
Godspeed to the dreamers, the wanderers, the wonderers, and the spenders of age.
Don
