It just happened again. I woke up feeling every bit my age, careening toward my morning shower—when I was swept with joy because I love my shower curtain. I love my shampoo. I love that I can trust that the spray will come out at the exact warmth and intensity I prefer.
Eight years ago, at the age of 63 when I was fraught with the challenges of growing old in our ageist, dysfunctional society, I vowed to transform myself from victim to explorer. I viewed the far side of midlife as wild territory, full of dangerous unknowns, and saw that my mission as a participant/observer would be to report back my discoveries. Happy to say, I believe that I’m making head-way, even if some of what I’ve encountered has required a greater degree of hacking away through thorny brush with a duller machete than I would have hoped.
I have to admit that fraught is not an accidental choice of words but the most accurate way to describe my mood for much of this journey. The early stretch was the most difficult, where you still believe that if you just try hard enough, you can stop the more serious effects of aging from happening to you. But only when the irreversible losses begin setting in and it is clear there’s no turning back, do you become a candidate for serious transformation.
One can learn to reap the benefits of aging, but there is an investment to be made, and it is rarely pain-free. One must also do the challenging philosophical, religious and spiritual work of coming to terms with the world, questions of ultimate concern and the human condition as well as the difficult therapeutic work of making peace with one’s past. There are issues of legacy to be attended to, disillusionments to be faced, amends to be made and self-love to be administered. Much of this journey into the unknown is harrowing, some of it transcendent and most of it unexpected.
But there comes a time when the fraught nature of the work is done, even while growth continues apace. For those who live long enough to transit beyond transition to transformation, eventually—mercifully–spiritual growth no longer centers on the metaphor of a heart broken open, but rather, on a heart grown whole. There is, at last, not only the fraught journey through older age—but an arrival.
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