La vida feliz

Each of us must answer this for ourselves; as Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote over a hundred years ago, ”One by one we must all march on/through the narrow aisle of pain.” My own answers can often feel like a desperate sort of flailing, just short of madness at times. I both believe and disdain my rationales, depending upon the moment. It was only today that a new answer emerged, one that did not explain the grief, but simply found company in it.

The company I found was in listening to the local classical music station. It was Gustav Mahler’s birthday today, a composer whom I otherwise often dismissed as overwrought.  One of his many lieder (German for song) titled, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” was played, and the announcer read its German translation. It is as follows:

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time.
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world’s tumult,
and I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
in my love and in my song.

As fraught as the lyrics are, the music and the performance were so utterly heartfelt as to be transcendent. It made me think of my resolve during the throes of childbirth: that if countless millions of women could have braved it, surely I could as well.  There is no sorrow any of us endures that has not been suffered by countless others as well; perhaps that can help us bear our own. Perhaps that is, in the end, the greatest and most necessary consolation: that we are not alone, or that, if we are, we can embrace our solitude, as Mahler described so poignantly.

Katherine Mansfield wrote, “Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is the mystery.” I am learning, once again, to stay with sorrow long enough for it to be transformed into something that can almost seem like beauty. It was a gift from the universe to have heard one of Mahler’s lieder today, on a day when I doubted I could find beauty again. I want to pass this gift along to you, in the form of a recording by Kathleen Ferrier.

One of the core central practices of mindfulness in Buddhism is to affirm and meditate upon “The Five Subjects for Daily Recollection” on a daily basis. These affirmations are believed to be essential for living ethically and consciously at any age. The Five Recollections, as they are also known, are:

I am of the nature to age. I will grow old.

I am of the nature to be sick. I will grow ill.

I am of the nature to die. Someday I will die.

All that is mine will be separated from me.

Whatever I do, for good or evil, I will be heir to.

Lenore Flynn wrote beautifully on mindful aging in this article. Disease and dying are often treated as such taboos in our culture, and yet Buddhism reminds us these forms of suffering are the essential nature of existence.

For me, contemplation of death and dying was anathema in my early youth, but as I have become increasingly more adept at discovering the joy in existence I have correspondingly been able to accept its pain, its inevitable losses, its ultimate cessation.  I like believing my task is thus two-fold:  to stay centered on what is good and joyful about existence, and to remember how utterly transitory it is.

It was Plato who summed up his life’s work with the counsel, “Practice dying.”  It is a fine balance to keep an awareness of death in the midst of loving life; the Five Recollections serve as one of the most consoling ways I know of to do so.

Still, at one point a year or so ago I was sincerely committed to a good faith effort in that regard.  It was in part an appreciation of the complexity of knowing one’s animus, one’s shadow side as a female, and partly just an exercise in creative nonsense while avoiding other less enjoyable obligations.  To that end, however, I took my full name, made an anagram of a male’s full name, Hayden Actien Webb, and wrote a complete blog in his voice.

It was great fun.  We have many choices in our lives but one of them is not typically gender.  I have often thought that if I fully imagined myself as a male, I might be a better partner, friend, colleague, a better mother to my son.   And I really wanted to envision an animus that I liked, an elder male mentor I could respect.  A mentor of my own imagination.

After about twenty posts I abandoned the project, not because I wasn’t enjoying it but because it occurred to me that in certain important ways the differences between genders as culturally imposed templates become less and less prominent across the lifespan, as if there is a merging of the two gender identities. I notice this most immediately with faces and bodies. I find myself attracted to the elderly faces who project a strong, non-traditionally gendered persona, faces like Georgia O’Keeffe’s or William Trevor’s. It occurs to me, however, that my idealized sage sort not only looks non-gender specific, but behaves in cross-gender ways.  An elder with both great strength and tenderness sounds ideal to me.

Michael Meade represents one of the male elders who not only embodies those ideals but also works actively to be a mentor to the young males and tragically-overlooked war veterans our culture has not known how to nurture and support.  His website, Mosaic Voices, offers a number of resources for those committed to greater wisdom and service across their lifetimes. The top image in this post comes from his website, and seems to me to beautifully symbolize our role as elders, both male and female.

In the meantime, if I could design my own elderly visage (and in fact some cultures do believe we create our own faces) I have a pretty good idea of what I would want to look like. Conscious and kind sums it up. The wrinkles – well, I think I’m starting to like them.

But in general, Nancy said she had too much to do and too little energy to carry anyone who could not meet her exactly where she was and the way she was.

It’s a matter of honor to cite the authors of my favorite quotes, but this particular quote was passed along to me without its source by a friend who has since fallen away.  (The relationship, more precisely, not the friend, though that is truly one of the insights of maturity for me – that friendships, no less than forests, can be utterly deracinated. Astroturf where verdant density once breathed.)

Her loss notwithstanding, the quote itself seems most aptly both a license and a pardon for many of the inevitable endings we find ourselves deciding to initiate. A colleague was recently describing her 87-year-old mother’s decision to divorce her 89-year-old father. She laughed, utterly mystified by it and utterly understanding it simultaneously. But why not? we both concluded. Why shouldn’t one have the right to do exactly what one wants in the very few remaining years of one’s life? How can all the constraints of duty, contracts, and the (largely unmanageable) emotional needs of others be allowed to usurp one’s deepest instinct about what one needs to survive?

This tension between the rights and needs of self and the rights and needs of others is a minefield most conscientious adults labor in all their lives (leaving out the psychopaths and narcissists, of course).  But isn’t tipping that balance in oblivious favor of oneself close to defining a narcissist or, worse, a psychopath?  Is it ever really one’s “own” life?  Or is “me-first” a hard-won right earned across a lifetime of self-deferral, not to mention self-sacrifice?

In the very least I like to think that at near-sixty I’ve earned the right to declare my permission to leave – job, friendships, home, marriage, persona, party, religion, committees, housework, therapy, plants, maybe even existence itself  - whatever binding constraints I’ve chafed at believing it was my duty to endure, like it or not. It isn’t a lack of commitment to anything other than my own ornery self that is guiding me, nor is it a wish to abandon all that I love and support and benefit from. It’s an insistence that I count myself in the equation of relationship, and if my own rights and needs are being disproportionately diminished, it’s permission to make the choice to peel off the damn girdle.

Of course now all those constricting undergarments are called shapewear. Well, frankly that sounds to me like a euphemism to keep us striving to be other than who we actually are. I think we should get to choose the terms of our existence. And like that unaccounted-for Nancy quoted above, I rather like the idea of insisting on being met exactly where I am.

So now I’m what?  A “senior citizen”?  A woman of “advancing years”?  Maybe an “oldster”, “older” or simply “old”?  “Mature” whether it is an apt description of  my behavior or not, could be the label.  Easy to ignore the categorization when AARP sends out their friendly invitation but at age 60, I’m there.  Or am I?  I want to somehow challenge the assumptions about “old age” without selling out my loyalty to those older than I, as I will be lucky if I am able to enter those “advancing years”.

The place to start with all this may be the language.  Unfortunately, we live in a society where there is no term that instantly conveys respect, appreciation and acceptance.  An entire page could be created about the associations with any of the words in this posting that appear in quotation marks.  “Elder” as opposed to the “elderly” is probably the best, but it is a push for me too.

There are so many of us entering these years, so many with creativity and  extraordinary wordsmithing.  Let’s bring new words to the table — not because we are more deserving than those who have already bravely made their way along these paths and not because we are embarrassed by the current options for the “old” and the “older”.  Let’s do it  because we recognize that we too, have been guilty of discounting the value and the wisdom of those who are “advanced in years” and that it is time to step up to the challenge.  Create language that is real, words that show reverence, labels that honor.

Can that happen without a change in cultural values?  Who knows.  Why not try?

And increasingly, the need to read the words written by people in my own age becomes challenging.  Much good to read, but oh, to hear from those with the years of experience that leads to wisdom.

What an absolute treat then, when Persimmon Tree appeared.  A challenge for those of us who prefer to touch and feel the paper we are reading, but still a remarkable assemblage of creativity and talent by women over 60.  To quote the editors, “Many women are at the height of their creative abilities in their later decades and have a great deal to contribute. Persimmon Tree is committed to bringing this wealth of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art to a broader audience, for the benefit of all.”

Okay,  sometimes I print it and sometimes I email the magazine and beg for the inclusion of a one button option that would print the whole thing, but that is me and their offerings are great.  Some of the authors and artists have fame from the past and it will feel like a step into a scrapbook of sorts and some are delightful new finds.

Go find it — you’ll even be able to read their library that dates back to the grand beginning — Spring of 2007.  No cost.  Quarterly.  Immerse yourself.

http://www.persimmontree.org.

The new issue, Summer 2009, includes in the nonfiction section, the following offerings, by decade,  of sagely wonder aimed at the experience of entering the next decade –

Vivian Gornick Turning Sixty

Sandra Butler Tiptoeing Toward Seventy

Dorothy Bryant Pushing Eighty-Still Pushing Books

Roussel Sargent Reaching Ninety

Katherine Bradway On Approaching My Hundreth Year

Theodore Roszak’s genius in The Making of a Counter Culture is certain once again to revolutionize our understanding in his new book, The Making of an Elder Culture.

His latest insightful treat offers one of the more salutary visions of what may be possible as the “saging” demographic continues to swell in numbers. As he says in his foreword, “Every institution in our society will be transformed as its population drifts further and further from competitive individualism, military–industrial bravado, and the careerist rat race. It is as if the freeways of the world will one day soon begin to close down, starting with the fast lane and finally turning into pastures and meadows.”

The link below will take you to an excerpt and the opportunity to purchase the book. I plan on reading it and am certain you will want to do so as well!

http://www.secondjourney.org/itin/09_Spr/Roszak_09Spr.htm

It’s taken me over half a century to to recognize that busyness is an addiction.  Every once in awhile I think about retirement and how surely that will be when I can commit myself to meditation, to stillness, to doing nothing. But if I’m really honest with myself, I could make those commitments now. The problem is that I’m addicted to doing.

Tara Brach’s four-minute video is the antidote for me.  As she so beautifully reminds us in this video, in Chinese the word for busy is the same word for heart-killing. Taking four minutes each day as a “sacred pause” could arguably be one of the easiest routes to “saging.”

Reb Zalman was among the first to offer insights into reconceptualizing the aging process, drawing on many religions and traditions and emphasizing the increasing importance of making meditation, exercise, and spiritual healing a part of the second half of life.

In his efforts to “revitalize” Judaism he has been committed to interfaith dialogue, feminism, the Gaia hypothesis, and the rights of LGBTs.  His entire life is a tribute to the power of self-growth and community service to effect change in the world. His book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, is one of the many insightful guides we can find for making the transition from a youth-dominated mentality and culture to a deepened wisdom and maturity.

Hats Off, on the other hand, tells the hilarious and quirky story of Mimi Waddell, an irrepressible force of nature voted as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in New York – at the age of 90.

Yes, I wrote 90. As in, years old.

Finally, there’s the charming tale of Martha and Ethel, exploring the complicated and poignant  ”dynamic family relationships set against the backdrop of changing American attitudes toward parenting styles, [and] the role of women in society, race and class,” as Canobie Films describes.

Each of us has the capacity to use the palette of our ongoing lives to make a work of art out of our years to come.  I read a lovely Guatemalan proverb, “Everyone is the age of their heart.” Perhaps that’s the secret of “eternal” youth.