We Are Not Alone

What I really didn’t expect was the constant need for readjustment. Your body is a suit that no longer fits you, it’s  not quite your shape and size and you are never quite comfortable in it. Your mind keeps dropping thoughts the way a novice knitter might drop stitches. You start projects and don’t finish, either because you run out of energy or because you lose your self-confidence. What you knew yesterday may no longer be true. You lose faith in your memory, seek confirmation, draw back from an ever-less-familiar world.

Old age is not fun. At one time, you  jumped out of bed joyously some  mornings; now you linger, open your eyes and close them again. …for just five more minutes…. ten. Why not just stay in the comfy bed?

I’ve heard a woman roughly my age say that she wakes up grateful to be still alive. I try to turn my mind in that direction, but not always with success. There’s no way to escape the fact that I’m one day closer to the end of my life, that I’m losing strength, my light is dimming.

A dear friend some fifteen years younger than I seems unaffected by gloomy thoughts like mine. But she told me, “I know I come across as bubbly, but I ‘m like a piece of mid-century furniture: it’s veneer. I too have to talk myself out of bed in the morning.” There’s comfort in knowing I’m not alone.

When I was young I loved Dylan’ Thomas’s exhortation that we  “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” But why waste what  energy remains on futile anger? We are temporary forms of life, like all others, we die but life continues. It’s the illusion that we are separate that afflicts us.

My t’ai chi teacher sent around a video of a flock of small birds flying together in a murmuration, a great shifting formation, at sunset. I think they were settling for the night, but perhaps they were preparing for a thousand-mile journey. Might we humans not likewise join, separately but together, as tiny specks of light within a similarly great gyre?

Credit: ID 236102356 © Henkbogaard | Dreamstime.com

Caption: Starling murmuration at sunset in the Netherlands.