I was talking with my friend Scott Carrino yesterday, we have become good friends, honest friends and he said he had the sense that after my  work as a journalist, and in corporate media, and coming upstate and to the farm and getting divorced and falling to pieces and putting myself back together again, that I had come to what he called a “crystallizing time”, a time of honesty, authenticity and a sense of clarity about my life. I mumbled something and blushed, I did not know what to say, that kind of praise completely unnerves me and tongue ties me.

I knew what he meant about the crystallizing moments, thought. Joseph Campbell writes that the gift of aging is knowing where you are, of having learned something about life and about a willingness to share it and pass it on. I know where I am, and I do not fool myself into thinking anyone is out there waiting for my wisdom, but it is true that I have become much clearer about life and about how I wish to live it. Tuesday was a grueling day for me, I was setting up some new Open Groups and also dealing with the various financial, transactional and software companies involved in taking credit card  and PayPal subscriptions for my website. It was a vastly more complicated process than I imagined or was prepared for.

This was  not the sort of thing I have ever done before, it is not something I was comfortable doing. All in all, it has taken me two and a half full days work setting up the subscription program, faxing and e-mailing codes, passwords, business certificates, tax returns, bills and the hundred protocol numbers involved. I vaguely remembered when I had a secretary for the first 15 years of my work life, and then a part-time assistant for some years after that. I would have turned it over to them. The loyal techs at Mannix had done their work, it was now my time to do mine. Nowhere else to go, no one else to pay.

Those days of secretaries and assistants are gone, I am the writer, the secretary, the assistant, I am now fully responsible for me, not a bad place to be. My cadre of enablers is gone also, there are other dramas to follow, I have really no choice but to grow up, a pleasure at my age. It took many hours yesterday, but I got it done and was happy that I didn’t lose my temper, didn’t succumb to frustration and kept my perspective. I thought of those uncomfortable people in India, dealing Americans all day and I decided not not be another one of them, despite mishap after mishap. They are the human barriers corporations push in front of spoiled and angry Americans, they are anger absorbers, cannon fodder,  they have no power to change the awful reality of corporate indifference and greed. For me, it is imperative to treat them decently, we are both pawns in the same game, we are on the same side, each of us being manipulated in a different way.

I wish for a world in which these people had real jobs, and I did not have to seek their dehumanizing help in living my life.

When I got uneasy, I took a deep breath. I remembered that it would get done. I remembered that this kind of problem is not really all that serious when you consider the world or my life. I imagined the end result, people subscribing safely and easily. It has come to be. How lucky, I thought, that I would have a subscription system at all, and that I had finally worked out all of the details involved in setting it up.

It is a crystalline time for me, I am conscious of not wasting my life in anger and conflict and frustration, at not bemoaning the real nature of life. I am learning what is important and how to stand in my truth. At the pharmacy, Bridget said she was sorry I had diabetes and I said, no, I am not sorry. I have life, and life happens every day. I am not sorry about life, I am never sorry about life.

Campbell said growing older was one of the richest times in a human life. We have finally learned something, we do not have enough time left to waste it in the many ways human beings squander away their lives – in fear, argument, frustration. I suppose it easier to be authentic as we grow up. We have less left to lose. I welcome my crystalline times. I’m ready.