“I am luminous with age..” – Meridel Le Sueur, who lived to be 96.

I feel luminous at 76. There is, I see, no language for me or people like me, people like Meridel Le Sueur. I often feel like a n outlier, disconnected from my peers, and my community.

Almost every time I write about my revelation that cannabis gummy bears are helping me to sleep, I get a message like the one Barb sent yesterday: “Gummies are wonderful for sleep, especially for us seniors!” Barb speaks the language of the aging, the language thrust upon her by our greedy and selfish culture.

The problem is that preparation for aging in our modern culture seems to be concentrated almost entirely on buying the latest device,  anti-aging creams, or hair dye, trying to scrape up a million dollars for retirement, getting a raise from the corporate boss, and rushing to the health club to stay young looking.

The most significant health problem is not my body or how I look at others but how I look at life.

(Photo, Windowsill Gallery, taken with a Leica SLR-S Mirrorless Camera indoors, little light).

Barb sent a kind and generous message, and I appreciate it.

But I also winced, as I always do when older people succumb to the wretched vocabulary of aging that our media has embraced. I decline to engage in the old talk – “at our age, we are seniors.” We are what we say and think.  I don’t think I need gummy bears because of my age; I need gummy bears to sleep because we live in an aspiritual, greedy, angry, violent, and distracting world.

I believe old talk can kill; it is a path to self-degradation. I can already see the first e-mail chastising me for not simply accepting Barb’s good wishes and graciousness and shutting up.

That is why I can’t accept it; Because I love Barb and hope she finds a better way to see herself.

Every young person I know has trouble sleeping, and the people who sold me my cannabis say young people line up all day waiting to buy their cannabis; it is rare for someone my age to come in, he said. I was never more unhappy than when I was young and have never been as happy as I am now.

I wanted to tell Barb that I never slept less or more uneasily than the first three years after my daughter was born, or dodging the savage knife fights that raged in the corporate workplace when I was a boss, or when I was driven by the idea that I needed to advance, make more money, be more powerful.

Ask any shrink who has more trouble sleeping, young people starting, middle-aged people obsessed with ambition, or older adults who are more accessible than ever to figure out what their lives are about and try to live as happily as possible.

Why confine all of this misery to older people? No wonder people shun us.

I have learned that we are all in this together; no one in our world has a patent to suffering, and age has little to do with it.

I used to find myself in charge of things; hundreds of people worked for me, I was living in a higher social group than anyone in my family had ever lived in, and I had more money than I had ever had.

Now, “at my age,” I work for myself, make my own decisions, and have little money to show for it—just peace and contentment.

Suddenly, I looked in the mirror and was old, and as quietly as I arrived, I was suddenly just as quietly dismissed. Our culture sees the old as invisible and without long-term buying power. The elderly have been a boon for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

I am at an age that seems to have a tone of shame and apology to go with it, an embrace of the language of incompetence and irrelevance. We are often invisible, better locked away than hobbling around; how could my life be almost over when I began to understand it?

Will I succumb to the language of aging, which insists on portraying getting older as a defeat “at our age,” succumbing to the idea that being older is some obstacle to life, not a new wonder, new phase, or sacred opportunity?

Like Le Sueur, I am luminous. I chose to stand with the men and women who never engage in old talk, those who see with open eyes, hear with finely tuned ears, speak with a softer and more knowing tongue. We need a new language for older people and a new way to talk about older people, just as we need a new understanding of animals.

These are the people of the soul, and my goal is to be one of them.

As I age, I have begun to see the world differently, more wisely, I think, more tolerant.

Life is a treasure to be explored and considered, not a fearsome race to win, build a McMansion, buy a speedy boat or $60,000 truck.

There are fewer and fewer absolutes in my life; I am free to think if I wish, and I do.

I am less dogmatic about everything, especially God’s nature.  I am less intolerant. I am less angry. A walk in the woods with Maria is worth more than all the promotions, bonuses, and power I achieved at the so-called “high points” of my life, the life I was expected to live, and the brief time I was mildly famous.

I no longer value life based on what I want but on what I have. Love is not about having so much; it is about having enough. When I see other people clawing and fighting to advance to have more and more, I no longer envy them. I pity them. They don’t know what they are missing and have not yet learned that life is all about being young and rich.

As the circle of my life shrinks, I no longer see people as roles or labels. My happiness does not center on any politician.  My values now rest entirely in me. I embrace the freedom of aging. Life is no longer a race, a contest, a competition. I am, at long last, me and free to be me.

As I think about the world and my place in it now – “at my age” – I realize that the tragedy I see, the tragedy of life, is that so many people in the world have so little that even surviving is beyond them. What is my responsibility to these people now? Compassion for others, I have learned, is what spirituality is all about.

We don’t ask spiritual people to govern us. We choose liars, opportunists, traitors, and thieves.

The spiritual people, denigrated as weak or woke, are silent, far away from the raging wars. They are beginning to stir. It’s the perfect time to be one of them, to tell the truth, embrace compassion, practice empathy, and work to improve the world, no matter how small the effort. We have never been needed more.

In my mind, the vital thing for the spiritual is to make myself part of the change. The new reality posed by ecological danger can’t be done only as a nation. It can only be done one person at a time, not in arguments with people who have given up thinking for themselves.

Jane Goodall told me how when she wrote: “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Maria understood this before I did. Every bug, spider, and baby bird she saves makes a difference. She doesn’t need any political party to think for her. Neither do I.

That’s my task, my vocation; my life is far from over; in many ways that matter, it is just beginning.

As I think about my life, I realize that the spiritual life is a life of compassion, empathy, caring for the needy, telling the truth, and mentoring the young.

In the other world, not the spiritual one, the liars and thieves have come to power; being compassionate, caring for the young or the old, for the sick and the poor, have all become spiritual tasks, and the other world has rejected them. The challenge for me is to be better every single day.

That makes the spiritual life beyond precious. It makes it luminous for me.