When The Going Was Good

It hasn’t rained for a few days here, although the rains are set to return tomorrow and remain for the foreseeable. This brief respite from the wet has given the ground a chance to drain and even dry out a bit in places, as I found yesterday while discovering a new walk. I couldn’t have done the walk for the first time if the ground had been sodden, for fear of sinking in and causing possible injury and then being stuck half way up a hill and out of mobile range.

These are the kinds of anxieties that beset us as we try to come to terms with advancing years. Being stuck somewhere, out of range, out of earshot. Growing older is not for the faint-hearted, not because we have to push harder to achieve goals or even climb steep hills without falling into the bog, but because of the reverse. We have to accept that much of the time we can’t do these things and it would be imprudent, and unfair on others, to try.

Acceptance is the first challenge in that stage of life when the going is not as good as it used to be and I think it will probably be the hardest, for me at least. You have to be by nature a patient sort of person to accept life as it is and I am not patient by nature. I like goals and deadlines. I like to get things done. I like to move around and discover new walks – in life as well as in the countryside. I am also someone who has spent most of their life with one foot in the future. There was always going to be something new and exciting just around the corner.

One of the biggest challenges of getting older is coming to terms with the fact that we are now living the future we were dreaming of in our younger years. Whether for better or for worse, it is almost certainly different. And it is the difference that matters. The difference is full of things that were not envisaged or planned for. They are the sum total of the present moment. They are worth relishing – even the not so good ones. By relishing I don’t mean a vaguely enforced sense of gratitude for character building unpleasant experiences, like a failed love affair, but the owning of what these occurrences felt like, how we dealt with them, how we would deal with them now, with or without the wisdom of hindsight.

By wisdom, I don’t mean the ability to make cuttingly clean decisions in regard to any one course of action, or to remain aloof and objective in every possible trying situation, or in regard to people who, try as one might, it is very difficult to like. Wisdom is won the hard way, in a gradual process of learning to understand at depth what it means to be human. In other words, to understand the significance of story.

If you have read this far, you will have a life story of your own. You will be concerned with making sense of your life story. This is not the prerogative of the old. It is an open invitation to anyone. Making sense of one’s life, however short or long it has been so far, involves connecting with other people’s stories, even if they have never told them. We only really understand ourselves (and so begin to forgive ourselves) when we understand others. The reverse is also true. The alcoholic parent was simply a human being who couldn’t cope, who was angry, felt betrayed and at some crucial point in their life, unloved. They have no means to work through these feelings, or to accept them, so their ‘anaesthetic’ as my mother used to call the gin and sherry mix which she reached for at eleven in the morning, lies in some form of mind-numbing drug.

Everyone has a story. Everyone brings to any experience a heady mixture of half-forgotten memories, of pain, joy, boredom, disappointment and various kinds of fear. Every person has their own fear, or numerous fears.

Most of us only come to terms with these fears later in life, when we realise what they are really about; the desire to please a parent, perhaps, or the fear of oblivion that keeps a person awake through the small hours of the night. We fear sleep as we fear death.

But it need not be like this. Sleep, even if we need a bit of chemical help for it to kick in, is ultimately about acceptance. It begins with the acceptance of the present day. There is always something to be grateful for, and by that I mean real gratitude, not the kind of enforced gratitude that comes with saying grace at meals. I mean the gratitude that comes with thinking ‘thank God that happened today…or didn’t happen’. It means acceptance. Acceptance is surrendering into the eternity of the present moment. Who knows which side of eternity we will wake to? One thing we can be sure of though is that Someone will be there to meet us. Thank God for that.