I am coming into my time. I was never good at being young. A friend of mine tells me is terrified of getting older, he has just realized he is going to die. I sad I have just realized I am going to live, we are on opposite sides of mortality. I was always much more afraid of life than death.

My friend was telling me, as so many others have, of all the things he has lost at 60 – strong legs and knees, much hair, the ability to run as far as he used, weaker eyes, freedom from doctors and pharmacies, the list went on a long time.

I stopped him as politely as I could, and I said I was not comfortable engaging in old talk, my soul might be listening. He was just depressed, not awake. If you never think about death, it comes as an awful shock. We older men think about death, but do not necessarily submit to it.

I confess to avoiding people who grouse about their age and aches and pains and pills, they are in spiritual trouble and heading for a bad place.

I think old talk kills lots of old people, they  become what they fear, they have given their souls to the people who design our lives for their own profit. They need us to be frightened in order to get our money.

I am grateful to be getting older. I told my friend that I believe I have gained many more things than I have lost.

I have gained love, for one thing, something I never could find when I was  young, I was much too dumb an inexperienced to know what it was or how important it could be.

I have gained patience. I could never have taken the time to learn  how  new lens works, to fail and fail and fail, to take the longer view age brings us, along with perspective and patience and experience.

I have gained my beloved farm, I never set foot on a farm when I was  young, it seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with me or my life, only to find out later that it was my life.

I have three wonderful dogs, two sweet donkeys, and a bunch of barn cats and chickens, things I would never have had when I was young, or wanted. I was too busy living my life to live my life.

I’ve gained friends who know me and accept me and love me and trust me. I never  had friends when I was young, I was too self-absorbed and frightened and restless and ambitious to make friends and keep them.

I have gained peace of mind, something I never had when I was young. When I was young, I took valium pills to help me sleep. As I get older, I don’t need  pills to sleep, although I took them for 30 years.

I have gained a blog and my photography, two things I never could have had in my life when I was young. I was too frantic and distracted to write about my life every day, it would never have occurred to me to be open and share my life with a stranger. I never once thought of taking a picture when I was young, I did not see the world around me, I paid no mind to the color and light in the world.

I would never have talked to donkeys every day, and sat with them and communed about the nature of life. What young man would do something so silly?

I have learned how to make love to a woman in the way of older men, slowly and thoughtfully and selflessly and mutually, when I was young I was in a hurry and cared only about myself.

Now, I see the world anew, and I worship the light, it is a part of me and my photographs. My friends who are women tell me the same thing about getting older, there is much joy in it for them. Like me, they can live in the now rather than worry about the future.

Today, I sat in the woods and read Wendell Berry’s thoughts about getting older. Like me, he was sitting on the ground watching the first leaves fall.  He thought about finally falling on the same spot where he was sitting.

“The event, among all its ramifying causes and considerations, and finally its mysteries, begins to take on the magnitude of history. Portent begins to dwell on it. And suddenly I apprehend in it the dark proposal of the ground. Under the fallen leaf my breastbone burns with imminent decay. Other leaves  fall. My body begins its long shudder into humus. I feel my substance escape me, carried into the mold by  beetles and worms. Days, winds, seasons pass over me as I sink under the leaves…I am at peace.”

I closed my eyes and thought about the honesty and fearlessness of those words – they could never have been written by a young man – and I, too, was at peace. When I move to go, I too rise up out of the world.

There is much joy in being an older man, no one but  us has seen so much of the world or knows it as well.