I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head:
I am closer to 70 than I am to 40.
How did this happen?
But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t and done worse things to people I cared about, though I reassure myself that I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
It’s certainly the truth that, unless science makes a major breakthrough and quick, I’m in the last third of my life, or fourth, if things turn on me.
What’s it mean to age beautifully, to look to those ahead of me who somehow managed to slide this way in lush embrace of what life is, in its silky, spiky, wild wholeness, and not that mythical thing we all seem to chase for far too long—the imaginary, perfectly, finely-tuned life that we aspire to?
What’s it mean to look to the people who were our friends when we were just kids and they were where I am now and really seek what magic there was in that?
It’s where we live best, and live longest, slowing the swirl to the drain, when we can master what those people knew and I didn’t, except to be drawn to their energy.
We look to those around us and there’s the moment we’re heading into where we start to view those younger than us as the competition, or our replacements, or, worse, as something inferior to what we were, and living wrong in comparison to how we think we lived (in our time-smoothed falsification of our real histories), and we build up that division, and start seeing ourselves wrong, and the inexhaustible well of wonders starts to dry out for us, because we just don’t lower the bucket far enough, and finally give up.
I lived in a whirlwind of incredible older women when I was a kid, the kinds of ladies who, when the men were out smoking on the porch after the meal would lock eyes with me and say “Joe-B, what are you thinking about?” when they’d catch me in one of my familiar reveries, where I’d retreated into the corners as a habit of the regularly persecuted.
I’d tell them, and they’d listen, and really listen, with interest and a kind of joy in sharing a moment with someone in that ripe, shaggy part of life where everything’s new and scary and still full of that juicy, indescribable richness of discovery. It was a treasure to me then, when I was ten and my most magical friend was one special fifth grade teacher in her mid-forties, and god, she was such a baby then, and yet so far ahead of me when I get mired in the glum spectacle of realizing my age as heralded by the cracking of my joints and the jarring pain in my knees.
My teacher listened, but not as an obligation, and while her air and carriage was patrician, it never patronized, and the secret I misunderstood wasn’t that she was nice, or abundantly kind—it was that she manifest a genuine curiosity, and didn’t see me as the generation coming to replace her, and to render her life just another obsolescence in a timeless circle of such things.
My mother’s boss listened, too, and got me on some fine and detailed level, and would engage with me without talking down or drowning truth in treacle.
“Joe-B?” Ms Gilley would say, as we lay in the grass on the hillside below her little rural house she bought as a retreat from her worries back in town. “Did you know the sunshine is eight minutes ago?”
“What do you mean?”
“The light from the sun takes eight minutes to get to us, so we’re always seeing sunshine that happened eight minutes ago, millions of miles away.”
“So the real sun is always in the future?”
“In a way it is,” she said, and had that little tone of well, how about that in her voice, and I loved it, and loved her.
My grandmother had the spark, too, while her second husband lacked any trace of it, always scolding me that kids said “Ma’am” and “Sir” in his day and wondering how we’d ever attend a dinner at the White House without humiliating ourselves.
Fred Rogers had it, maybe in a more concentrated dose than anyone else famous, and I watch him at his work in my mid-fifties with both the comfort of an old familiar thing and the studied eye of someone looking to learn.
How do we beat back the feeling that things are getting worse, that people are getting worse, and that we’re all doomed to be replaced, presumably by an inferior generation of uncontrollable, incomprehensible kids that we, ourselves, reared?
Is it really so hard, or do we just need to remind ourselves the life is inexhaustible as long as we view it that way instead of through the clouded lens we use to measure the past against now? If we study the meditative art of projecting ourselves back through our own history, back to the ages we were when we were those oft-mentioned kids these days, so we can inhabit the present day as our old selves, lost in the baggy souls of a live lived long, and recapture the curiosity, and the joy of it, as well as the compassion that comes from understanding that we were often lost, confused, and wrong-headed, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know.
When I think of it, it’s a touch of the inexhaustible—I am on the downhill side of a life lived long, lustily, lazily, and haphazardly, but I can still look to the generations chasing mine over the hill with curiosity and joy, and bask, vicariously, in the joy and learning that awaits them, too, like it awaited us, and put it all in the context of sunshine from eight minutes ago, or eight years ago, or eighty years from now, where it’s all still shining, and will shine, and was shining tomorrow, and it’s just eight minutes and eight minutes and eight minutes and I have to pause, because it comes on suddenly, a pang, or a stabbing pain in a joint or the small of the back—
All those people are gone now, and I miss them like crazy.
The next ones that came along, too, are gone, and soon the next ones will gone, and one day I’ll be gone, too, and that’s almost too much to bear, except that I’m here now, eight minutes away from the sun, and I have the same capacity to do what the people did for me all those years ago, to radiate my own light for those that’ll need it, and to wallow gorgeously in the life they might have, themselves, as they rush forward through time like I’m rushing, against my will, caught up in a river that’s raging, but where I can still swim.
I can still swim. I can still find the exhaustible.
And I will. Watch me, or not, from eight minutes away, or eight feet away, or as you remember me from downstream, where you’re meeting your own challenges and failing and rising and learning and living all of it. I’ve been cultivating, and here I am.
There is only everything; it is inexhaustible.
Keep going.
© 2024 Joe Belknap Wall