A fun question takes a turn
My family celebrated my dad’s 88th birthday over dinner last week. It was a cheerful night with conversations popcorning around the table. At one point, my husband was teasing my dad about being old enough that one of his children is nearing 60 (that would be me). My dad pretended to swoon and suddenly everyone at the table was tuned in to our conversation.
To deflect the focus from my own upcoming birthday, I said that I listen to a podcast where the host always opens by asking her guests their age and how old they actually feel. (I highly recommend Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me if you haven’t yet listened to it.) “So, Dad,” I asked dramatically, “we know how old you are today. How old do you actually feel?”
He hesitated and I volunteered to go first. I said, “Inside, I feel 35 but many days my body feels 90 years old.” “Ah!” my dad replied. “My body feels 70 but, because I forget things sometimes, I suppose I must feel older than that mentally.” The question circled the table until finally arriving at my husband, who announced, “At work, I’m suddenly kind of an elder statesman, so I think I feel my age inside. Physically though, I’m in the best shape of my life. I feel like I’m 35!”
This is NOT FAIR
I will confess that, though I really do love my husband, in that moment, instead of feeling happy for him, I felt a wave of pure fury. I stewed for most of our 90-minute drive home. “How is it possibly OK that we’re the same exact age and he is in the prime of his life and I (thank you menopause) am creaking around in an unfamiliar and often painful body?” I was consumed by a wrath not unlike a toddler’s – THIS IS NOT FAIR!
When my kids were young, my friend, Annie, had a particular bit of homespun wisdom that she often shared with all of our kids when they were screeching exactly the same words that I was thinking after that dinner. “A fair is a place you take a pig and bring home a ribbon.” Ugh. She was right. She is right. Life is not fair. I know this.
So why on earth am I so upset? Well, because this particular piece of unfairness – that men (at least the two at my dinner table last week) get to feel 20 years younger than they are while women (at least me) get to feel 30 years older – is upsetting. So I have given myself a moment to feel my very appropriate feelings. Then, because feeling upset about unfairness is neither life-giving nor fulfilling, I decided to dig a little deeper looking for at least the glimmer of gold lettering on the “ribbon” of aging.
We think of vulnerability as something to avoid but maybe it’s just the way things are
The poet and essayist, David Whyte, writes in his book Consolations, that,
“Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something that we are not ….”
As I read and reread this, it began to dawn on me that, thanks to menopause, I am being confronted (a.k.a slapped upside the head) with my own vulnerability. I am aging. I will continue to do so. Though hopefully I will live for a long while yet, I will not live forever.
Whyte goes on to describe a choice all of us have to make as we mature through the ups and downs of life. We can, with the veneer of youth, pretend that everything is OK, everything is fair, that we have everything under control. Or we can embrace all of life – especially our losses and pain. Doing so develops our “intimacy with disappearance.” When we allow life to touch us like this, when we begin to “inhabit our own vulnerability,” we become larger, more courageous, and more compassionate.
When you live like you know you’re dying, life is better
This essential truth of the human experience – our own finitude – is one that most of us ignore for as long as possible. But we do so at the risk of not experiencing the fullness of our one human life: we are born, we grow, we stretch and learn and become, we age, and, at last, we die. Is it not possible that, thanks to the midlife changes of my female body, I am lucky to get to spend decades living with an awareness of the fleetingness of life? Is it not possible that the same is true for all of you – whether you’re an aging woman or not?
So what if my body is not ever going to feel 35 again? Maybe the fact that my mind still feels 35 – ready to learn, ready to share, ready to walk alongside others in their journeys, ready to soak up the joys of life that are always sparkling within “the rest of it” – is all that matters. I think Whyte would agree. He describes the life of a person who is able to inhabit their essential vulnerability as generous, robust and full.
If that’s what life could feel like for me when I’m (God willing) celebrating my own 88th birthday, that’s more than fair. I’ll take it (and a ribbon, please).
In the Yoga Sutras we are invited to grapple with our own mortality (abhinivesa) because accepting that we’re eventually going to die helps to lessen our struggles in life. Living with this elemental vulnerability allows us to connect more deeply to the people who fill our lives while holding true to our most essential values.