I had spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about all the ways in which i was too this or too that or not enough of this or that, all the while trying to convince someone that they were enough for their loved ones and friends just as they were. I was 8 years older than my friend and was frequently reminded that i was older than he thought anyone should be. The whole live fast and leave a sexy corpse view on life…one i did not see the logic of. For the first time in my life i began to look at myself as old, as i was frequently reminded how settled and fuddy duddy i was while those younger than me still wanted to live fast and dangerously and chase things that probably shouldnt be chased.
Now that i’ve had a few weeks of silence to reflect on the past year’s events i have returned to an earlier perspective. I am settled, and that doesnt make me fuddy duddy, it makes me stable. I own my own home and land and i have a place to call my own that no landlord can take from me as long as i keep paying my mortgage. The years i’ve lived have given me wisdom and patience that i didnt have in my twenties. I was very good at “an eye for an eye” in my twenties. Bordering 40, i no longer have the chops for that kind of reaction to a hurt. As a 20 year old, you dont think about the task of showing people Jesus’ love and his grace through your actions. Every year added to my life has taught me something and the older i get, the more knowledge i have. i still have a handful of close friends who i cherish and a couple have reached out to tell me what our friendship has meant to them and it reminds me that there are people in this world whom i care very deeply about and i feel very lucky to have them in my life. Most of them are at least 20 years older than me, as i’m 36 and i usually roll with the 60s to 80s crowd. I just dont care about fluff. I dont care about shallow surface level conversation. I care about the bare bones stuff. I want to get down to the middle of issues, the meat of things. Im a do-er, not a talker. The older crowd has always had things of substance to say. Conversation is always meaningful and interesting. Our get togethers serve a purpose. We’re making little candies with a cross penny and a bible verse printed out and taped to it to throw from the parade float in the down home country parade or we’re building a doghouse or decluttering a hoarding situation. We’re gardening or trimming tree limbs, or brainstorming the theme of my friend’s next art class, but we’re not sitting around guessing at what’s going to be this year’s autumn colors when the fashion magazines finally release the color palette. There are exceptions but i prefer to hang out with those 20 years older than me or more. Now that im looking at it from the other side, i couldnt imagine telling any of my other friends that they were too old. My artist friend has a beautiful head of gray hair and a hearing aid, and i know in my heart that i love her more now than i would have had i met her in her thirties, because she was a less wise, less patient, less insightful person at that time. Everything she is today is an accumulation of everything she’s been through. Her reliance on God, her knowledge of scripture, her patience with everything life throws at her, and her whole view of life is all different now than it would have been in her thirties. She is my best friend and i wouldnt trade her for a younger version of herself.
With age comes knowledge, not only of how to conduct yourself differently as you move through the world, but of how to build and repair things, how to shake your canned beans before you buy them to listen for the rattle of beans against the metal which will tell you those ones aren’t fully cooked while the silent ones that barely jiggle are…how to calculate the exact dollar amount you need to give the gas station attendant in cash depending on the emptiness level of the tank and the cost per gallon, so that you dont get your credit card skimmed, how to leave the gas cap door closed until after you’ve prepaid so that no one can tamper with your gas tank only to ‘come to your rescue’ when your car inevitably breaks down very shortly, how to peel pomegranates so the seeds fall out, how to make a slit and then squeeze each longan fruit from the sides until the white part pops out whole, how to dig holes through rock most quickly and efficiently, how to care for animals, how to survive in the winter, how to budget for survival without also becoming so frugal that you begin to worship the amassment of money rather than the means to help others with the acquirement of it, further understanding of scripture you will be studying your whole life, better first aid knowledge, how to make natural bug spray and burn remedies, how to cook things from other countries like lotus root and octopus, how to cook and eat cicadas when there is a pandemic and no food in the groceries, how to scale, gut, and clean a fish, how to make your own compost, how to keep orchids happy, how to hem your own clothes, how to effectively communicate with horses, how to collect, process, and grind sumac, how to identify where water pipes, electric wires, and studs are when trying to make interior shelves, and most of all, the thing you learn with age is gratitude. You dont appreciate the feeling of sunshine, wind, or rain on your skin as a young person. Life is all moving so fast and you are just trying to keep up with it. When you are nearing 40 you realize that everything has an end. That you yourself have an end, that the rainy season has an end, that oversized toddlers with nuclear warheads could blow us all up tomorrow and there’d be no more any of this. The birds, the trees, the foxes, the buildings, the sound of humans, it would all be gone. When you get older you look at the heavily wooded hills and you know that in the name of “progress”, this will all be cleared some day. You look at every body of water knowing it is by the grace of God that anything is in it. You watch every sunrise thinking, “this too is a privilege. One day there will be no more of these for me and so each one i get to witness is an amazing work of God, a chef’s kiss gift, a painting of light and color, shape and texture…just for us to witness and behold the beauty of before beginning the day. Every sunset and then arrival of darkness is a reminder that all living things must rest for a time in order to function. Every tasty food is a moment of enjoyment. Every ripe berry, every yard tomato, every raw spoonful of crystalized honey, every barely cooked morsel of fresh deer meat, every buttery fried quail leg, every seriously good dill pickle…its all deliciousness we are only allowed to perceive because we are here, by the grace of God. The well water tastes amazing because you’ve lived in enough places to be able to compare it to the chemical laden recycled waste water that comes out of the faucet in all of your previous dwellings. The usefulness of a laundry dryer or a porch dish washer is not lost on you because you’ve known years of bleaching clothes on the laundry line in the yard and cleaning the sunflower yellow pollen stains from the garments where honey bees took a rest without your pemission, you’ve known the years of hand washing glass water bottles that you cant possibly get your hand down into and instead are trying to swish dish washing soap around the inside with a wet paper towel swirled around a wooden chopstick or skewer…every butterfly, every bird’s nest, every bat…all profound gifts from God. Rain hits differently. It becomes the gift of survival. That moment when the trees bud after winter… everything becomes more profound with the passage of time. It holds more meaning as you realize there is a limited amount of these perceived experiences and as you get close to the halfway mark in life, you realize you are running through them. As a 36 year old i am grateful for so many things, regardless of what is going on in the world. That’s the thing about being 20. At that age you think you cant stop to enjoy anything until everything is right. But this is a fallen world. Nothing here will ever be perfectly “right”. You have to find a way to have gratitude anyways. And with age, you do. I no longer look at myself as “too old”. My 106 year old patient is still propelling her own wheelchair, transferring herself to the toilet, and she holds a constant open policy of “will exercise for lolly pops”. She is so so valuable to my heart. There is no age at which people become unvaluable. They just get better with age, like sharp cheese or a revered wine. The longer they have been alive, the longer they have had to study the word of God, to learn from their experiences, and to refine their behaviors towards others. Age is a good thing, and a normal part of the process of living.
