When I get older, losing my hair . . . Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I’m sixty-four . . . (Lennon/McCartney)
Aging wine and cheese coming into its full ripeness. The ancient turtle stopping traffic while burying her eggs deep in the mud on the lane by my creek. The magnificent oak dating from the 1600s standing solidly on its huge old trunk by the track where I walk every morning. Old songs. Old lovers. Old jokes . . .
When this song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney came out in 1967, being sixty-four seemed very old and impossibly far away. It’s been several years now since I’ve seen sixty-four, and how can that be when I still feel so young? Except that I do notice that all my friends and contemporaries are turning into curmudgeons. As the psychologist and writer James Hillman says, “We old ones are indignant, outraged, ashamed.” He asks why older people become moralists, sentimentalists, radicals, chaining themselves to trees, marching, lecturing Walkman-ed ears about the moral decline of the West, “flicking a cobra’s tongue when we get riled.”
What I am finding is that I and they, my recalcitrant friends, are becoming more and more just what we are, with no apologies. Perhaps because as Dylan Thomas said, we “rage, rage against the dying of the light”? Or because we’re just too tired to pretend anymore? Or maybe, just maybe, because before we were ashamed or guilty or apologetic about who we were, and now we delight in being ourselves . . .
The paradox is that we also seem to have more patience and compassion. My father, who was still alert and sharp at 95, used to be judgmental and opinionated; at 95, he greeted almost everything with a tolerant twinkle and nod. My 88 year old mother was convinced that indeed, the world was getting to be “a better place” all the time.
Regardless of our age, our soul’s mystery continues to evolve. Oh, may we delight in it! ” It ain’t over ’til it’s over.” Tennyson’s portrait of the aging Ulysses, scarred, haunted, longing, says:
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil, Death closes all; but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with gods. . . . Come my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
And . . .
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles . . . Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Come, my friends . . . For my purpose holds . . . To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die . . .
What happens to us as we age? As we accept that “we are not now that strength that we were” but still “strong in will,” how do we “sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars”? Where is that?
Our bodies change, perhaps “made weak by time and fate,” perhaps just seasoning. They sag and droop, and we wonder who that person in the mirror is and when did THAT happen. But this is the exciting thing: along with the descent of our body parts, perhaps we are growing down into our souls also. Deepening — deepening our capacity for humor, for joy, for reflection, for anger and outrage, for compassion. There is meaning in this “growing down” . . . Let that be your consolation the next time you discover yet one more displaced body part.
Maybe the last pieces of the journey, the final adventure, the “work of noble note,” of which the aging Ulysses speaks, is “Growing Down” rather than the achievement of any power or profit in the outer world. In that Growing Down process, any will to power or control or greed can be replaced by, as the writer Helen Luke so elegantly describes, an “immediate presence in which love flows clear-eyed into all our exchanges.” Growing Down to a place, not where power is overcome by love, but where love is power and power is love.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty lively may I walk,
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty living again may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.