We may not yet have found any palatable alternatives to growing old, but we have many choices regarding how we will age. The three most obvious options are to revile aging, deny it or romanticize it.
Those who invest increasing amounts of effort to game the future, maintain the status quo or fix what’s broken but with diminishing returns are the deniers and revilers. The romantics make the attempt to treat age as a graceful sabbatical. But no number of cruises, positive aging seminars and gated communities can ever completely offset the reality of aging, with its inevitable losses and incursions.
Then, there’s a fourth option. It’s rarely discussed outside the writings of the mystics because it asks too much of us. But it is the only choice that holds the potential for the fulfillment of life’s promise.
Go wild. Vault into the abyss eyes wide open, hair flying. Try as you might, reality is going to have its way with you. Fix what you can, within reason, make the best possible decisions when you must, but as for the rest, do as the mystics have taught us: choose to face the future more curious than afraid. This is not the extreme sport of the extraordinary elder, meant to inspire the rest of us to take up mountain climbing at 70 or marathons at 80. But of an even more extreme movement—that of the heart taking a leap of deep faith.
I’ve tried the alternatives. I’ve done all I could to push through my limitations only to end up splayed on cobblestones in an exotic location far from home. I’ve tried to orchestrate the future by figuring out which place, which person, which protocol will guarantee safe passage through to the end, only to realize there is no such thing.
So what’s left? Just me. Vulnerable. Humbled. Broken in places. But today, more often than not, I no longer look for anything outside myself to define what aging means to me, let alone to save me from it. In fact, I see now that all I ever really wanted to know was whether I’m beloved, wherever I land. This takes courage beyond what I thought I had in me. But here I am, surveying the wreckage that came into my life despite my best efforts and discovering that somehow, for reasons beyond my comprehension, my heart beats still.
I don’t know what the future holds for me. But this is no different than before, when I’d expended tremendous effort trying to wrestle aging into something manageable. Now I am content to free-fall into whatever life is for me. At times life is cruel, other times magnificent. But regardless, I no longer steel myself against the future because having gotten the answer to the only essential concern, the question of belovedness, saving is no longer necessary.
So here, at last, is the palatable alternative for which I’d been searching, for I am no longer growing old. Oh no, fierce ones. I am not growing old. I am growing free. longer growing old. Oh no, fierce ones. I am not growing old. I am growing free.
