Aging

After a long hard Saturday of cleaning and preparing and then a Sunday hosting our annual Kick-The-Season-Off-Dock-Day, Monday, Memorial Day, 2004, was definitely a day to rest. Our old policy of “a day to prepare, a day to enjoy and a day to recover” takes on new meaning for us each year as the preparing part and the enjoying part becomes more challenging, making the recovering part even more and more necessary.

Aging is a cruel joke. Just as you are old enough to know some important things and figure out what you want from life, you’re too tired to do it. Well, I’m not laughing.

But Monday morning we slept in, awakened by a wonderful hardy rain drumming rhythmically on the roof. It was an invitation. Most of the day I spent on the screen porch embedded in the glider cushions reading. Ron came out for a while and we sat in devout silence. It was one of those profound pauses in time that often come at the conclusion of frenzy. I felt compelled to grope for a word that would best describe how I was feeling about having a gloriously unstructured day, as though that definition might have a more medicinal effect. All I could come up with was “repair”.

I was staring out mindlessly toward the back garden and the lake beyond and my eye refocused in on the bouquet of gardenia blooms sitting in front of me. I had rescued the fragrant blossoms earlier from sure rain damage and stuck them in a plastic cup of water, a leftover from the previous day’s festivities. The thing that caught my eye was a sparkle of light on one perfect drop of rain hanging tenaciously to the tip of a creamy petal. I told Ron to be still, afraid that any movement might cause the droplet to fall. I eased up, careful not to bump the table, and slipped away to find my camera. As I was sprinting up the stairs two at a time, I told myself this effort was futile and the drop would be gone before I could return to capture it. But it was still there and I got my shot.

Afterward my thoughts wandered off to examine this whole aging thing. I was feeling much like the raindrop, hanging on precariously by nothing more than surface tension. I was so tired I could hardly move, let alone dash up the stairs to retrieve my camera from my office at the other end of this house that seems to grow as I get older. So, where did that burst of energy come from?

I concluded that I have plenty of mental and spiritual energy remaining; it’s just that my decaying body is letting me down. The slow decline that we experience as we grow older lulls us away from certain activities by small degrees until one day we realize we simply cannot do what we used to do. Since our hearts and minds are still raring to go, this comes as something of a shock as though it happened over night. If we aren’t mentally prepared to give up the physical things we no longer have the oomph to handle, we are often left thinking we are done altogether. But this isn’t true; we are not done. We are merely in transition.

Again.

Life, it turns out, is primarily a series of transitions. From birth to death we change. Sometimes we think we have to hang on. Sometimes we cling stubbornly to what was, like the rain droplet because we don’t want to go to the next stage. Mostly we are only afraid of the unknown. But every stage of life has its rewards if we are willing to look for them.

I took a picture of the droplet on the gardenia petal and now, as a photograph, it is a visual work of art that can represent all that was excellent about that single moment in time. Unfortunately we can’t do that with our lives. We have to make each moment singularly worthy. We cannot cling to what was and still have enough energy to make something great out of what is.The rule is: we have to let go before we can move on to the next stage even though we might be in a state of freefall for a time.

Accepting when it is the right moment to let go of one place in life to make way for the next is the hardest lesson of all but the one we must learn if we want to make the most of who and what we were meant to be in the time we are allotted.

That was the original goal wasn't it?