Saturday, June 16, 2012

The Quiet Whisper of Hope


There is nothing in this world more essential to life than hope. Where it lacks, there is no light. Hope, to me, is the breath of life; it emboldens you and makes you brave; the echo of promise, ever present. It lifts you up when you are leaden, and keeps you going when you feel weak. Hope, of all things, reminds you to dream, no matter how things might look; it is optimism given license….the quiet whisper that says, it is possible. You deserve it. What is yours will come.

I just turned 50 today. And I am so excited. I am telling everyone who will listen I am 50! The way I see it, today marks my induction into a new life passage; the best years of my life. I can’t explain it, but I feel proud to be 50. I know, with the years, the tiny brutalities of aging will continue to hit me – a changing body, discrimination, invisibility. But I intend to find refuge – even salvation – in my aged worldview, unfettered by petty grievance or the silliness of youth. To live in a way that integrates everything I’ve learned into my visceral self, edging me slowly to a different way of being that says, this is your life. It is a gift. Relax and enjoy the ride. Make every day count. Dedicate your focus to finding beauty, even in what isn’t pretty. Endeavor to be kind. Don’t ever forget that hope is the chalice on the altar of dreams. And to keep it alive, don’t look back.


[To Jerry – whose encouragement, support and generosity of spirit have given me hope, in the most profound sense of the word.]

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

On Turning 50: Longing to Relax


If our “second adulthood” had a jumping-off point, it seems to me it would be the year we turn 50. Up until that point, I think, we often carry on as a version of our younger selves, still bound to the ideals of a culture bent on youth. We get smarter about how we spend our time and have a stronger feel for who we are, but we’re not quite at the point where we’re counting the years we might have left. If we choose to, we can still deny the process at hand, and unless we have terrible genes, we can fare quite well.

But our 50s are a whole new era. It gets a lot harder to play make believe. Yet if our eyes are open, we gain access to a new pool of wisdom, and we can start to get our feet wet. Pretending loses its appeal. We begin to let go and enjoy the freedom that comes with aging.

At least, that is what many women have told me, and what I, in turn, believe, in the most visceral sense one can have. I am about to turn 50 in ten days; the beginning, as a friend of mine calls it, of my “second wind”.

I am aching for a revolution. More than that, I am aching to relax, in every conceivable way. And nothing brought that home more than my mother, just out of the hospital, set on a regimen, unwilling to consult a second opinion. Without going into details, let’s just say that what I saw in her scared the daylights out of me. Because it was a blown up version of something I’d been witness to my whole life: an unquestioning loyalty to an authority outside herself, and a “pulling in” – not the kind of pulling in we do in introspection, but a pulling in that involves tightening, holding in or holding on.

I know she is doing the best she can with what she has. I know she is fighting the only way she knows how – her “pulling in”, oddly, is also a form of protest. But it doesn’t help, because I want to see her happy, and because of what it triggers in me. I am deathly afraid of becoming rigid as I age. In my experience, one of the many challenges of getting older is a tendency to resist change, even when our sanity, or peace of mind, depend largely on the contrary. Living in a society where elders are so grossly undervalued, it’s easy to hold our emotions in as we tell ourselves, nobody wants to know anyway. If we become bitter about society’s disregard for us, we would often be wholly justified.

But do we want to sacrifice our quality of life to silent protest? I certainly don’t. Nor do I want to become set in my ways – yet I have already seen signs that this is where I am headed. And it’s chilling. I remind myself that my stress levels are high; that seizing up is all I’ve known, and that I am actively working to unlearn it. Then my mother re-enters my consciousness, and the haunting resumes.

In many ways, she and I are polar opposites in our personalities, priorities and character. We would never be friends if we weren’t related. We have worked hard to find common ground over the years, and to focus on the love we have for one another. And I do love her – fiercely, desperately, and without bounds. But her way of coping; of dealing with her emotions, really fucks me up. I can’t be around it. I need fluidity. I need to learn how to really relax into life, and to court change. And I hope as I enter my 50s, I can find the strength to do just that.