turning a corner
As of this moment, I am one week away from turning 70 years old. Birthdays are presents we give ourselves and each one is a milestone in our lives. In this blog, I want to ruminate on what becoming and being 70 means to me. It is the start of my 8th decade living in this body on this planet; reflecting on this feels important to me.
The light in my eyes, the lightness of being
Me on strap-on roller skates, Centralia, Ontario, circa 1954.
For some reason, in pondering the importance of writing this blog, the above image of my self, kept coming to my mind…when I wore a younger man’s clothes (thank you, Billy Joel). What haunts me about it is quite literally the lightness of expression, sheer joy of smile, and the body-posture. Clearly I am posing and what the camera captured was a moment in my life when I stopped to be photographed, the latter something I have never relished in my adult existence. Only tangentially do I remember the skates. What I do recall is the feeling exuded in the black and white picture together with what I see in my younger self looking at the image now – grounded, still, touching my body, eyes squinted, weird little ears, pug nose, an apparent skin-tan highlighted by the whiteness of my shirt, seemingly effortless smile, and in a posture that feels odd to observe now…not one I would choose or one I remember ever doing for anything again. Something elemental there is in this version of me…an innocence, yes, and also a way of be-ing in the world…posed, poised perhaps, just light exuded. And I wonder at Wordsworth’s profundity he penned more than 200 years ago, “the child is father of the man” (from his poem, My Heart Leaps Up, or The Rainbow).
Did the light last, was/is it evanescent? Some years ago, in my early 50s, at a leadership course, the facilitators offered the idea that at some point in all our lives, something there is that turns that light out in all of us. It might be cultural conventions, the dictates of growing up, moving through time, becoming ‘responsible’ adults, as though a lid were put on exuding that elemental being, that light, the lid covering up and suppressing who we be. Do we do it to ourselves? Unanswerable – to use one of my wife’s favourite expressions, ‘how long is a piece of string?’ Abraham Lincoln was reputed to have said, “Every man over forty is responsible for his own face.” For my self, I believe there were lots of times during my life when it felt like my lid was sealed pretty tightly and/or that I had to be or act like a person I truly was not. And it was a bit of a conundrum – my way of learning was to imitate those who did something I wanted to do and while it worked, I often felt not in myself until I sensed I had engulfed or semi-mastered what it was I was learning – Latin, tennis, euchre, motorcylce riding, marathon running, teaching….And I am responsible for everything that happened to me or I chose to have happen inside me along with my impact on others. I am responsible for my own face and so much more. I also know from inside me and from the reflections of others, there were so many times throughout my life when that lightness of being exuded itself, was re-ignted, and sat gently between my eyes or whispered in the porches of my ears (Hamlet’s expression, I copy it here).
At nearly 70, I think of decades in my life. Birthdays before I was 10 were the candles on cakes made for me. My teens when I pretty much knew everything. My twenties when higher education enveloped me. During my thirties, accepting fatherhood or being a father while, at the same time, running both put on and removed – randomly, it seemed – the lid of my being as I learned to move my body in a way I never knew I could. In my forties, trying to take responsibility for my face, I struggled in many aspects of my personal life and engaged in all manner of processes, counseling, and read every book I could find to help me understand who I was and who/how I could be. My fifties were a time of both turmoil and a kind of sedimenting or settling into being grounded again, this time partnered in a way I never imagined, and more like the feeling of my past self on roller skates. For my sixties, I have felt a sense of calm ooze into and from me, an ease of being, more like the serenity on the visage of my Royal Doulton Merlin-the-magician statue that faces me on the window ledge of my office. And there are so many more feelings, memories, scenes, senses, images that stream through my consciousness and my awareness of decades and time past.
Thus, I arrive at the threshold of 70. 15 minutes ago, I posed for that picture of the little boy in Centralia. Clichés, along with my own experiences abound in my imgination about age and aging. You are only as old as you feel; you’re not getting older, you’re getting better; age is just a number. 70, 60, 80…is the new middle age. And the vanity of hearing a former student opine that I am “the hottest 70-year old he knows.” Lines from literature form in my mind’s eye – J Alfred Prufrock’s wizened assertion,
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled
(The lines are from T. S. Eliot’s famous poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, itself a primer on pondering aging and the essence of being). I remember when I was about 8 years old racing my grandfather (seated in the picture below), he in his 60s, wearing his slippers and coveralls, to the chicken coop on his/our farm – he won, and I was acutely aware of him being sixty-ish, an age I would never be but if I were, would I be that fast? How and who do I want to be in my 70s? When I reach 80 and feel I lived my life fully during my seventies, what will I remember? Becoming seventy is just that…it is part of becoming, part of growing, more learning, stepping into me while being fully aware of the ways I impact people important in my life. It is new territory, a terrain I want to explore gently, compassionately, fully, completely.
During the whole time I have been writing this, in addition to the beckoning of the roller-skated little boy, I have been hearing reverberations of the title of Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I loved the book, the movie too. And the title, thematically perfect for the narrative and film, irks me in its literal form. Lightness is a quality, a way of being to embrace and exude, not unbearable in any way, in my view or in my experience of the fullness of life, privileged as my life has been. The almost-70-me and the little boy turn another corner and tumble home to lightness with anticipation, exuberance, and respect.
