The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.
Robert Frost
Today is my seventieth birthday—that biblical milestone of "threescore and ten years" that was etched into my mind at an early age—and I am compelled to admit that it's one of the strangest transitions I have ever experienced. I'm not quite sure why it feels so odd, so disorienting, but I hope to work through the confusion by writing this little piece. So please bear with me. My words may need to walk in several directions before I can find the center of this maze.
For the most part, I have paid little attention to the boundaries that separate the unfolding decades of our lives. Each transition has been negotiated smoothly, with little nostalgia and virtually no anxiety about the future. Seventy, however, feels like a seismic shift in the tectonic plates beneath one's feet. It's like one of those weather forecasts that you blithely ignore until the storm strikes your home unexpectedly in the middle of the night, banging the shutters, ripping off the roof tiles, and demanding that you pay attention—serious attention—to the realities of the moment.
As for the storm named Seventy, I have received the usual assurances that I'm only as old as I feel, and that, in any event, "seventy is the new sixty." I appreciate these optimistic sentiments, of course, but they are simply inconsonant my own sense of reality. Reaching seventy is the same as it has always been. It represents seven decades of struggling to survive; struggling to live an authentic life; struggling to find and retain love; struggling to build and support a family; and struggling to find meaning and purpose in one's life. It's seven decades of confronting one's fears and anxieties, while holding fast to the hopes and dreams that move each of us inexorably forward.
That's the reality of being seventy. It's nothing more and nothing less than the accumulated history of our lives. But here's the odd part: My personal experience of turning seventy seems completely untethered from reality. It does not feel like becoming, reaching, or attaining anything. Indeed, the image that comes to mind is one of floating—floating weightlessly above the earth as gentle winds nudge me out of one country and into another, the new one being far more more surreal than the former. This is a place the ancients would have clearly defined as terra incognita, warning unwary travelers that "here be dragons."
It may be that this feeling of surreality is simply the manifestation of an existential anxiety that seeks to abandon the subconscious and take up permanent residence in the conscious realm of my brain. Instinctively, however, it seems like something quite different, something that is difficult to define and quantify specifically. All that I can say for sure is that it involves the mounting losses that come with each passing year.
Most poignant, of course, are the losses of friends, family members, and those unique people who gave me unexpected solace, support, and joy. Losses are not confined to people, however. There is also the loss of innocence, the loss of opportunities, the loss of illusions that may have provided convenient props in youth and middle age. Whatever the case, few persons of seventy will be able to deny the truth of what Annie Dillard writes in Teaching a Stone How to Talk: We eventually become painfully aware of "the losses you incur by being here—the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay."
So what is one to do? I, for one, will take my first clue from Stanley Kunitz, whose poem, The Layers, describes not only the terrain I must travel, but the best path through it. In part, Kunitz writes:
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me . . .
(emphasis mine)
The Swiss philosopher Henri Frederic Amiel wrote that "to know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living." At this point in my life, I seriously question whether I can master anything during my remaining years, especially something so vast and complex as "the great art of living." I can move forward, however—go where I need to go, do what I need to do. I only hope that every step will hear my soul, in Yeats' immortal words, "clap its hands and sing, and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress." And it would be wise to remember something else that Annie Dillard wrote in Teaching a Stone How to Talk:
Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.
