Old age is a very good time for growing, learning and changing. I can also be outrageous if I want, and tell people what I really think of them, which scares the angry and hateful to death and chases them away.
I’m going to be 77 in a month or so, and after seventy, I’ve learned that the future is not about socializing, getting rich, getting famous or any geographical space.
It’s a state of mind. I can’t give my body instructions, but I can challenge my mind to think differently.
There are a number of different ways to look at the world at my age.
One is “I’m getting older, I just can’t do many of the things I did before.”
Today, we realized that our donkey Fanny had a painful abscess in her right leg. I used to get down on the ground, often with a vet and pick open the abscess. I can’t do it any more, I realized.
Maria could. She tied Fanny to the barn gate, dropped to her knees, took out some surgical tape and scissors and antibiotics, poked the abscess, watch as a stream of blood ran down her hoof. I held Fanny still with a rope, she tried to get away.
I could do that, and Maria wiped the blood and spread the anti-biotic and wrapped the hoof in a medical wrap.
Almost instantly, Fanny was able to put pressure on her foot again. I accepted the factd – we both did – that this was not something I could do any more.
There is second state of mind about growing older, and finally setting my own time and deciding what I can do with it.
I want to take even better flower photos, I want to make my blog even better, I want to encourage the Army of Good to help the Cambridge Food Pantry, a symbol of the sacred call to help the needy. I want to live years more with Maria, and walk the farm every morning with my camera, and learn how to manage money and help ensure our financial stability so Maria can stay on the farm she loves and in her studio after I am gone. I want to do good.
I even took Ukelele lessons which I quickly dropped – not for me – but was excited to try.
Most people assume that everything they can’t do they will be able to get to later.
I know better now that there is a powerful and exciting urgency to my life, time matters, what I do with it matters. Honestly, I think about it as a struggle between a kind of death and a kind of life.
There is no work I must do, only work I wish to do, no deadlines to meet, ambitions to submit to, no bosses to answer to, no rivals to compete with..
In our culture, writes Joan Chittister, “being edged off the upper shelf of life and into a kind of shapeless, formless, substance less nowhere land frees their very souls. These are the people who keep reminding themselves and the rest of the world that “we’re all getting older.” Chittister is talking about what i call “old talk” the universal of the elderly self-haters.
When I think about the future, there is another state mind bubbling up from my subconscious into the open. There is a sense of urgenty that comes with my new way ot understanding time and a call me to come alive now, to get going with life, and at long last.
My big lesson as I am aging is this: There is so much more to life than what I have known until now. And I am finding it.
There is the rest of live to be lived that I have been denied or denied myself until now, when there is now almost no choice but to live or die a slow death.
I’m not ready to die, in the body or the soul.
This is a learning time for me, not a shrinking or dying time. I have fresh chance to understand what life is really about, and I refuse to waste it.
