The Age of Miracles (2 page)

Don’t worry if you feel like you’re over the hill now. The landscape is different. We are removing the hill.

Visiting a childhood friend of mine, I saw a photograph of her from 20 years ago. The difference was dramatic, as she’d physically transformed from radiant youth to a more reserved middle age, and her face now seemed to say, “I’ve given up.” Yet I knew the spark of her youth wasn’t gone; I could still feel the fire she’d had all her life. “That’s Linda,” I told her, pointing at the picture. “I think you should bring her back.” And I could tell from her eyes that she knew what I meant.

We know, at least intellectually, that we don’t have to sink into dowdiness or resignation at midlife. Youth can give way to something else, something equally spectacular, as we are called into the next phase of our existence. We can consciously lay claim to a more glorious mid-and-later life experience than we might otherwise have had the audacity to imagine.

We can release the weight of unprocessed pain and embrace the lightheartedness of a wiser and more humble heart. We can see this not as an end-time but as a new-time. We can embrace the fact that in God there
is
no time. The new midlife is a call of the soul.

My biggest sorrow, when looking back on my youth, is how much of it I somehow missed. Now, looking at my life today, I don’t want to make the same mistake. I don’t want to miss this. As Bonnie Raitt sang like she was singing it for all of us, “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”

My youth was full of so many miracles that I simply couldn’t see at the time. But whenever I’m tempted to dwell on the ways I failed to embrace my good while young, I am reminded that the Author of my good has not run out of miracles.

That
we age, if we are lucky enough to do it, is a given.
How
we age is up to us. The purpose of this book is to take a few of its issues and look them squarely in the eye, put love into some of its more fearful places, and experience miracles we might otherwise have missed.

T
HE
L
ONG AND

W
INDING
R
OAD

O
ne day I received a couple of videotapes in the mail, containing footage of some lectures I’d given in 1988. I told my daughter I wanted her to watch them with me, to see what her mother looked and sounded like two years before she was born. I thought I was doing this for her, but soon I realized I was doing it for me. As she watched, she was mesmerized by the image of her mom not yet weighed down by years of sorrow, still light and breezy in both body and spirit. And I was sort of mesmerized myself.

A younger man I know once said to me, “I wish I could have known you when you were young,” then tried to redeem himself (once he saw me wince) by saying something about how he would have liked to have known me when I had all that fire. I thought to myself, but did not say,
I still have all that fire.
What I saw looking at those videotapes was the fire he referred to, yes, but I saw something else as well. I saw a fire I needed to reclaim for myself, a fire that the world had dampened but was still mine if I wanted it—true, it was no longer flaring to the surface, but it wasn’t really gone either. It was simply buried beneath layers of accumulated burdens and disappointments. The fire itself emerged from an ageless place.

Watching the tapes of my lectures, I was surprised to see my daughter so surprised. I hadn’t realized that she didn’t see her mother as a lighthearted woman, full of easy jokes as well as wisdom. I saw then that I’d become someone I didn’t really have to be—I had descended into the dark psychic waters of a few rough years and had simply fallen for the lies I’d heard there.

What happened to me is what happens to many of us, in one way or another. Age can hit you like a truck, knocking the wind of your youth right out of you. For years you move around in reaction, seemingly defined more by what you aren’t anymore than by what you are now. Yet slowly but surely, you morph into the next phase of your life—different, but not necessarily less than as opposed to more. The less or more part is up to you.

I remember buying a CD by Joni Mitchell a few years ago. The cover art is a self-portrait of her holding a glass of red wine: I sat looking at the picture for several minutes before putting on the music. And when I did, I was appalled. Nothing seemed to sound the same; I didn’t hear the Joni I thought I knew.
Oh my God,
I thought,
she’s lost her voice!
The high, sweet quality was gone. I, who had listened to Joni Mitchell for decades, didn’t recognize the sound I heard now. For at least five minutes I went on and on in my head about how Joni Mitchell couldn’t sing anymore.

Then I started to really listen, only to realize of course that the voice that was no longer there could not compete in magnificence with the one that had taken its place. Her voice revealed a new depth now, a longing that the voice of her younger self didn’t have. Somewhere between her soul and her throat, her past and her present, good pop tunes had alchemized into high art. Light and bright melodies had become deep, stark, soulful cries from the center of things. She’d moved into a place of power that is anything but
less than.
Someone already a giant seemed to have turned into a goddess.

Her path—and her changes—are meaningful to me, given my own experience. Having begun lecturing over 20 years ago, people sometimes tell me that they wish I would lecture “like in the old days.” And I know what they mean. I was flip. I was funny. I was telling it like it is. But it was the
’80s,
for God’s sake! It’s easy enough to be light and breezy when you’ve never seen anything but light and never felt anything but breeze. Later, when that’s no longer true—when decades more have been added to your personal repertoire of both pain and pleasure—your voice cannot
not
change. The question is, will you then lose your true voice or find it?

Seasons change, but all of them are spectacular. Winter is as beautiful as summer, in nature and in us. We needn’t be less compelling with age; we’re simply compelling in a different way. Being where we
are,
with neither shame nor apology, is what matters most. The beauty of personal authenticity can compensate for the lost beauty of our youth. My arms aren’t as shapely as they used to be, but I know so much more now about what I should be doing with them.

W
HEN I WAS IN MY 20s I WAS ERY INTO “YES”
: Yes, I will go here; yes, I will do that. But as I got older, I got used to saying “no”: No, I can’t do that because my daughter is at home and I have to get back to her; no, I can’t go there because I don’t have the time. It seems that I stopped thinking about why I was saying it and just got into “no” as a kind of automatic response to anything outside my comfort zone. And my comfort zone began to shrink. Finally I realized that at a certain age, too much “no” becomes poisonous. If we’re not careful, we start to say “no” to life itself. And it’s the “no” that ages us.

The responsibilities of a mature life often force us to focus on things that are immediately in front of us, and in that sense,
“settling down” can be a good thing. But such focus doesn’t have to translate into a constricted state of mind. No one can age well who lets go of their sense of wonder. You might find yourself thinking things like,
Oh, that museum. Been there, done that.
But if you make the visit anyway, you’ll realize that what you saw at the museum in your younger years was only a fraction of what your eyes can see now.

If you don’t exercise your body, then your muscles begin to constrict. And if you don’t exercise your mind, then your attitudes begin to constrict.

And nothing constricts your life experience like the constriction of your thoughts. It limits your possibilities, and it limits your joy.

All of us have seen people who’ve aged with sorrow; we’ve seen others as well who’ve aged with joy. It’s time to
intend
to age with joy, deciding that the joy of youth is a good kind of joy, but it’s not the only kind. In fact, there is a joy in knowing that after all these years, we’ve finally grown up.

A wave of new possibility is upon us, as a huge and formerly quite cocky generation has reached the years of thinning hair and less easy knee bends. What we will do now is not predetermined but rather remains to be seen, as each of us will see according to what we
choose
to. We can acquiesce to the downward pull of age and chaos, or we can fearlessly forge new ground—wielding the power of what life has taught us so far, laying claim to the possibility of redemption not only for ourselves but for the entire world.

Our generation has a lot to answer for, having partied so long and matured so late. Yet now that there is less life left, we’re ready at last to
show up
for it. We have the knowledge, and hopefully the courage now, to stand up for what we know to be true. We realize one chapter of the book of our lives has closed, but perhaps the next one doesn’t have to be worse. In fact, it could be infinitely better. These years can be something to celebrate and cherish, if we have the courage to take the reins of consciousness and create something new for ourselves and for the world.

Each of us has gone through our own private dramas, taken our own individual journeys; now we meet, as though at a predestined point, to pool our resources of talent and intelligence, faith and hope. Ultimately, we are individually glorified as we find our place within a collective heartbeat. We have journeyed alone, and now we’ll journey together. The real drama of this age is far from over. In a way, it’s just about to begin.

E
VERY GENERATION COMES BEARING ITS OWN GIFTS
. The greatest gifts of the baby boomers have yet to be mined, as they’re decidedly different from what we thought they were. They have as much to do with facing our failures, and the spiritual growth that comes with that, as with taking credit for anything.

An idealistic generation that was going to make everything much better has actually presided over an era in which many things have gotten much worse. Every generation, in the final analysis, is just people who were passing through. And during our pass, at least so far, we haven’t quite done yet what we came here to do.

Our epiphany, for those of us who are baby boomers, is that in many ways we wasted our youth—not in that we lived it frivolously, but in that, in far too many cases we lived it only for ourselves. Our parents and their parents before them became adults when it was natural to do so. They got on with it. We, on the other hand, put off a truly mature existence for as long as we possibly could. Now, having simmered as in a pressure cooker for decades too long, our latent maturity emerges with a sensitivity we hardly knew we had. Where we should have gotten to and what we should have realized at 20 or 30, we’re getting to at 40,
50, and 60. But it’s not too late. We haven’t lived through what we’ve lived through, bled the way we’ve bled, and been humbled the way we’ve been humbled to have it just be
over
now. In fact, we owe too much to the world to get off that easily. We were all born carrying a promise—a promise to make the world better—and there’s a yearning to make good on that promise that none of us can suppress forever.

There’s a silent question blaring loudly in our hearts:
What will I do with the time I still have left?
Perhaps we’ve been given a kind of reprieve, some extra time in which to get it right. Maybe because at the deepest level we were longing for one more chance to do something meaningful before we pass into eternity, eternity seems to have stretched a little.

It is the awful power of our newfound humility that gives us our one last chance at significance. Will we repudiate the glamorous meaninglessness that has marked our generation so far? Will we recognize the dark and corrupting patterns of our past and rise up to change them? Will we wield the power of lessons learned? Will we align with the creative pulse of the universe, preparing the ground for a glorious future in which no one can say that we simply gave up, but everyone can say that we finally got going? Once we reach a certain point, the revolving door comes around again—but only one more time. We have to get it right this time or we’ll die having gotten it wrong.

What we have called our “middle age” need not be a turning point toward death. It can be a turning point toward life as we have never known it, as we
could
never know it, when we were too young and arrogant to yet appreciate its limits. Aging humbles us, it’s true—but it also awakens us to how precious life is, and how very fragile. It’s time for us to become elders and caretakers of this precious planet, not just in name but in passionate practice. Until such time as God calls us home, we should make of
this
world the home of our dreams.

The realization that we’re no longer young collides at this moment with a sense of historical urgency. Our eyes are opened to the seriousness of this time, and our deepest desire is to do something about it. As we renew our commitment to the processes of life, then the processes of life will recommit to us. We’ll feel forgiven for a past that wasn’t all it should have been when we commit to a future that
is
all that it can, should, and will be—now that we’ve finally grown up.

The prodigal son did get home late, having partied hard, but his father rejoiced to see him. And so does ours.

Wherever you’ve been, and whatever you’ve done so far, your entire life was building up to this moment. Now is the time to burst forth into your greatness—a greatness you could never have achieved without going through exactly the things you’ve gone through. Everything you’ve experienced was grist for the mill by which you have become who you are. As low as you might have descended, in God there are no limits to how high you can go now. It is
not
too late. You are
not
too old. You are right on time. And you are better than you know.

Dear God,

May every phase of my life

be blessed.

May my thoughts of fear

not block Your miracles.

May I age into a deeper love.

In this, as in all things, dear God,

may the world not blind me

to You.

Amen