As I approach my fortieth birthday at the end of this summer, I’m haunted by Moses’ observation in Psalm 90, that a man is lucky to live to eighty. In the best scenario, that calculus puts me at midlife having officially missed my opportunity to get a tattoo without people assuming I’m suffering some sort of crisis. (Which I most certainly am, but I don’t want anyone to know, so please keep that between us.) It’s really not so much the tattoo. It’s that I ran out of time to outdo John Steinbeck’s writing The Grapes of Wrath before he was this age.
I’ve been asking some friends and family at the more extreme ends of the journey a few questions as I reflect on what wisdom there is for folks contemplating their mortality. “What’s the best thing about being your age?” One teen said, “freedom and no bills” and I felt the envy rise in my increasingly lactose intolerant gut. From the more seasoned, I got answers like, “Seeing my kids become adults and getting to spoil grandkids. Finally having some perspective. Financial security. Not being afraid of what people think of me.” So, those are good things to look forward to.
I also asked, “What’s the hardest thing about being your age?” My own eight-year-old said, “I’m too little to be on Wheel of Fortune.” Tragic injustice, indeed: another old soul imprisoned in the third grade. The elder participants shared things like, “Losing my physical endurance and metabolism. The urgency of the finish line. Watching my parents die. Fighting cynicism. Being treated like I’m irrelevant.” A much harder set of answers for meditation.
So, this Sunday we’re going on a journey together, consulting Scripture and the wise counsel of others who’ve come before us on this path. We’ll consider the ways we might experience our own age gracefully, whatever the number happens to be.