"Born to Get Old"

READING

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before -"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted so by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

SERMON

I was never more obsessed with aging than I was at twenty-five, when I looked nervously ahead to the vast future of my life and wondered what I would do with it. My twenties had not gotten off to a good start. I was already married and divorced, had no marketable skill except for typing, hated all my jobs, and secretly believed I wasn't fit for the real world. My college education - in philosophy, religion, Latin and Greek - did little to impress prospective employers. And neither did my attitude. I couldn't imagine applying myself to anything less than ideal - as if the world were Plato's "Republic" and everybody else were still in the cave. But no one wanted to hire a philosopher-princess.

Those were hard times. I'd awaken in the morning and a wave of anxiety would roll over me, telling me my life would be ruined if I couldn't figure out what to do. It took several years to understand what I had been preparing to do all along.

To this day I still have a sense of relief that I found it. I would not want to trade places with my younger self, would not want to relive that time, which was so terribly difficult. Not even now, as I enter the last year of my fifties, and face yet another milestone of aging. Going forward is still better than going back.

As I grow older, I have more compassion for my younger self than I used to. There was a time when I would think about those years and all I could do was cringe. Now that young woman is a part of me, in the way Sandra Cisneros writes about it. In "Eleven" she points out that as we grow older each year we are still who we were in the past. "Because the way you grow old," she observes, "is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one."[1]

May Sarton was 40 or so when she wrote the poem "Now I Become Myself."[2] In it she plays with the idea of time - how long it has taken to discover her true self. Too many years were taken wearing "other people’s faces," "running madly," using up precious time.

Then something happened. One of her beloved parents died. She began a new romantic relationship. And she was "dissolved and shaken," to use her words.

Perhaps she was at a turning point, seeing both loss and potential at the same moment, for she writes, "All fuses now, falls into place from wish to action, word to silence, My work, my love, my time, my face Gathered into one intense Gesture of growing like a plant."

Everything has come together, making her who she is. And she stands in that timeless moment. "Now there is time and Time is young."

I did not feel young at 40. For me it was another one of those points in life when all I could see was time running out. Now I want to reach back to the person I was and tell her, it will be all right. Everything that happens makes you more truly yourself. You have to be "dissolved and shaken" sometimes to get to that place where you can live in the present.

"O, in this single hour I live All of myself and do not move," Sarton wrote. "I, the pursued, who madly ran, Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!"

But the sun doesn’t stop, of course, and time seems to move faster as we grow older. The consolation is that we have become more truly ourselves, able to live comfortably with all the ages we have been over the years. If only we could have known that nothing is ever wasted in becoming who you are.

The good news is that one day you do know it. I read this pleasant report in the "Los Angeles Times" last month. "People become happier as they age."[3]
According to Dr. Peter Ubel of the University of Michigan, "The typical 75-year-old is more satisfied and happier than the typical 25-year-old." This I am already prepared to believe.

Researcher Laura Carstensen of Stanford University, observes that "as people age, they are gradually relieved of the burden of planning for the future." "Physical and cognitive decline notwithstanding, the later years are for many people the best years of life."

The new research is very encouraging, whatever your age. If you are young and worried about your future, you are probably doing exactly what you should be doing. The older we grow, the less future we have to worry about. This frees us up to be happy, or at the very least, better able to live in the present moment.

The "shrinking time horizon" is an asset. It sounds strange; after all, don’t we all just want more time? Or is what we really want to be able to enjoy the time we have, however much that is?

A lot depends on our capacity for enjoyment, of course. And anything can undermine that capacity. Suffering attends old age often enough: a debilitating physical condition or the responsibility of care giving; poverty; grief over the loss of old friends; bitterness and regret. These are very real problems and they don’t always have a good solution.

Most of us will face cognitive or physical impairment as we age. I’m not sixty yet, but already people close to me are learning to live with chronic conditions and disability. You never know what is lurking around the corner. Still it’s amazing how well people adapt to bad news and limitations. Yes, it’s hard at first, but people are capable of making tremendous adjustments and going on with life. And they learn - we learn - that our condition does not define who we are. That learning, like the shrinking time horizon, makes us free to live in the present. The "Los Angeles Times" report suggests several reasons why this happens. One is that "older people experience negative emotion less often and recover from it more quickly." No more ruminating about the slights and setbacks of the day - or perhaps we just don’t remember them.

After retirement, people no longer have to put up with work stress. "You can structure your life the way you want to," says one researcher. That is unprecedented freedom.

But most of all, it has to do with our sense of time. People become aware "that life doesn’t last forever - and with a finite amount of time ahead, they think it should be well spent. "The "Times" reporter concludes that appreciation for remaining time leads people to be "more grateful for what they have," and "being thankful is great for mental health."

When I was a young woman I suffered a great deal of anxiety about the future. But as difficult as my anxiety was, where there was relief, there was also tremendous gratitude. I see-sawed between a fear of the worst and a state of grace.

As exhausting as all that must have been, I could tell that there was something worse. I saw how people could be so overcome by life that they forgot how to be thankful for anything. When they were no longer thankful, they became bitter. And then somehow everything they might have gained was lost.

I don’t know what the future will bring. What if some terrible tragedy or betrayal overtakes my life and derails all my hopes and dreams? What if I get ground down by the vicissitudes of aging, day after day of not feeling well, loneliness, or loss? What if I approach the end of my life in a world that seems farther from peace than ever? It could happen. And if it did, how will I handle it?

I don’t know. There’s a good chance, given my anxious nature, that I'll at least be grateful that all of these things haven't happened, even if something does. I can't say for sure. That is the test, the "last of life," as Robert Browning wrote, "for which the first was made."

I like knowing that in a paradoxical way, time is always on our side. Though the years go by quickly, they bring more joy than they used to. And with every passing day, we move closer to our true selves, grateful and present.

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1 Sandra Cisneros, "Eleven," cited in "A Call to Character," Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl, eds. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997).
2 May Sarton, "Now I Become Myself," in Collected Poems: 1930-1993 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company).
3 Shari Roan, "Going for golden," in the "Los Angeles Times," October 15, 2007. All the remaining quotes in this sermon are from this article.