A few years ago, Dan and I bought a little houseboat. Dan sees it as a vehicle for adventure, captain of the high seas, although with an old engine that burns hot, we don’t go far from shore. Because of the boat, we have transformed Nashville’s humid summers from something to dread into a thing of wonder: water-cooled breezes, outrunning mosquitoes and soaring beneath lyrically-winged blue herons.
But in the cold and rain of winter, the boat is all mine. I go to the boat alone, neither needing to turn on the engine or even untether the lines to be transported into a simpler time and place. I have a little heater and a steamer to make hot tea. With sky over the bow and a roof over the cabin, I am free either to feel the cleansing cool mist on my face, or to snuggle safe and dry beneath as many blankets as I’d wish. When the rain comes, it bounces noisily off the roof and rolls down the windows, lightning and thunder putting on quite the show.
I would not have enjoyed spending so much time alone when I was younger. How ironic. I was always so afraid of missing out on things. Growing older helps slow me down, limits options, provides cover for the most tender parts of myself. This is the first time since I turned six and became self-conscious of myself as a thing to be judged that I could willingly give up performing for any period of time. I’d been trained from birth to swim upstream against my own natural preferences in order to be noticed. The recognition that I prefer to live in my small self came late and I would not now trade it for anything. Small is where I am grounded, nourished, whole.
When I forget—and I do—I pay for it. There is a lassitude, an exhaustion, a disappointment that feels like sickness but defies diagnosis. In this place, I wrestle with my aging body, believing that I can use sheer force of will to perform more efficiently. I stumble, I lose things, I have to take a nap. Going under, I see age as failure and feel myself emptying of life.
Even in this depleted state, if I find myself before others, I may automatically revert to pretending an energy I do not possess, talking too gaily and too much. Sensing myself ungrounded and ill-at-ease, I can feel when the connection is severed and others drift away. I stop mid-sentence and finally take refuge in silence. But in this defeated state, alone even when others are present, I am perfectly fine. More than fine. I may find myself being held in a sacred place beyond personality, where all that is false can have burned away and all that may remain is love.
If I encounter someone while I am in this state, I may share a smile, a nod but I very rarely any longer feel the need to perform. I listen, I appreciate. I would have once judged one such as this, on the margins rather than holding court, as dull. But in this place, owning one’s age is purpose enough, feeling full rather than depleted of vitality, I can look admiringly at the life teeming about me grounded, enduring: the immutable rock in the river and not the driven salmon.
All those years, spent being afraid I’d miss something. Or, probably a truth closer to the bone, that I could disappear and nobody would miss me. And yet, here I am, on these precious days, when I leave my everyday life to go climb aboard my floating vessel, loving the fact that nobody even takes notice. In this season of my life, when the cold is giving way to the first signs of spring and I may be more sorely tempted not to miss a thing, may I remember the lesson, no more than that, the gift of winter. I prefer me silent.
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