Reflections on the making of old bones
Words & Main Image © Paul Ransom
Age is just a number. Well, not really. Not on the weekend you turn sixty.
Beyond the numeral, the visible and visceral process of aging is less academic. Not so much a middle brow cliché as an existential call-to-action. Because, aside from the undeniable decline of the body – which will not be airbrushed by wishful thinking or clickable hokey – I am experiencing the count of years as an invigorating lightness, an increased clarity, and a quiet determination.
Rather than an irrelevance, the number is a serious prompt. Pause. Reflect. Offload. Turn corners. Refocus.
Of course, like so much prior resolve, present intention will likely be eroded by the grit and compromise of future reality. Of all the things age has illuminated, the blurring of grand vision to ordinary myopia is one of the more starkly lit. Therefore, I approach the root & branch review of the big six-oh with a perspective and humility I would not have managed at younger milestones.
At twenty, I knew it all. At thirty, I was less certain. At forty, almost apostate. By fifty, I had embraced surrender. Tomorrow, when the clock strikes sixty, I probably won’t care. Not so much anyway. I will be a day nearer to the clemency of oblivion, for which I will offer profound thanks.
As I prepare to join the ranks of senior citizenry, I celebrate the liberating banality of my condition. I maybe unique, but uniqueness is not the exception. For all my purported virtues, all my many vices, my body will incrementally decay and my window of subjective experience will close. Thereafter, I will be forgotten. Erased. Like the Earth itself. Ultimately, these words – all I am and everything I do – will register not as sound; rather, as silence.
- Some will think this nihilistic, negative, perhaps a sign of bitterness, yet I feel it as a sense of awe. At times, a kind of rapture. For me, there is a sublime grace, an oceanic compassion to be found in the blank stare of the uninvested cosmic eye.
At sixty, my wagons are firmly hitched to the absurdity. I embrace the futility, and revel in the inessential nature of self and world. Why? Because it works. If God or the universe has no fixed plan for me, has neglected to inscribe an essential meaning arc for me to trace, nor cares one iota, then I am at liberty to spend my final years as I may. Although choice is its own burden – and the inevitable discomforts of declining health and reduced capacity will impose ever tighter conditions – I can now navigate my upcoming demise without fear of divine judgement or the moralising nag of karmic score-keepers and legacy chantage.
Apologies if this sounds like fake mysticism, but rest assured the take-out is more practical. The cosmos and the after-life will unfold as they will, whereas I only need to approach the asymptote. This is the curve that most demands my attention today. Right/wrong, heaven/hell? Irrelevant.
In the everyday world of encroaching aches, slower recovery, and deteriorating eyesight, the question I am re-examining is: what stays, what gets flicked? Who do I wish to spend time with, energy on? What projects (pursuits, challenges, goals) are still worth the effort? Where is my centre, my ground, and how far (and for what) am I prepared to stray? And what will I do with this well of fire, this flood of love?
Partly, the answers can be boiled down to a familiar grumble. Can’t be bothered. With the drama, the hyperbole. With man-babies and bossy bitches. Flag wavers and fanatics. Predators and poor me moaners. Emotional blackmail and rote relationships. Status games and cool-a-thons. Self-improvement goals and wisdom trophies. Second guessing the algorithm or pandering to audiences. Oh, and I’m done with shoulder rubbing and networking. Don’t need your approval. Let alone the relentless noise.
Feel free to leave without saying goodbye.
However, as I segue into seniority, I am cognisant of doing more than perfecting the curmudgeon stereotype. Much as I have misanthropic moments, and find socialising performative and draining, I do not desire an arid, sour old age. The universe may have no special place or purpose for me, but this does not prevent me finding (inventing) my own wellsprings of passion and meaning. It may well come to nothing in the end, yet what riches may we savour on the way?
Strangely, these treasures are the trickiest part of the equation. Also, the easiest. The years teach you to let go, make looser plans, be open to happenstance. Likewise, to drop the ego, the fantasy of control. Yet – hovering, gathering – a more intentional, more explosive knowing. An urgency, like an elemental force. The deepest river. So long dammed.
We are all self-censoring; necessarily so. Social animals regulate individual behaviour. Without this we would be alone. Possibly extinct. I am no exception to this rule. Even so, there remains a wildness inside. Dark, Dionysian, destructive. Mostly, I resist its madder urgings because the long term costs far outweigh the instant rewards.
However, this energy is as much light as dark. It can feel, simultaneously, like ecstasy and despair. It is both brutal and gentle. Singular, directed, extreme, yet also nebulous, wandering, ambivalent. Since childhood I have held it back because, honestly, it’s kinda scary. On the few occasions I have yielded to its press it has upended the furniture. The high functioning consensus model of self that delivers on so many fronts is revealed to operate at the expense of something more thrilling. Dangerous. Truthful.
When I am high on it, when the wave is smashing through everything – when it feels like I am the wave – I hear her voice, and I love her in a way that does not have sane explanation. It is ecstatic. I am at once humbled and emboldened. You might call ‘her’ fantastical, a made-up muse; but I call her Beauty, and she is as near to a goddess as it gets for me. She makes the world shine, and I fashion jewels from the light she provides.
I know, crazy. Way too woo. Not what greying old geezers are meant to confess. Nor how they said sixty was going to feel. But…fuck it…I’m gonna die, and no amount of sensible, risk-averse rationality is going to alter that.
Therefore, in addition to the pragmatics of physical and mental fitness, and the excision of dead wood, maybe the time has come to uncork the genie. Give her full rein. Stand, arms outstretched, in the ego-annihilating mercy of her downpour. What better thing for a crumbling old man to do in his dotage, than to work in the service of Beauty.
The fire she brings would be easy to light. I have the matches; and the tinderbox is just…here. Go on, she says. Each day that passes leaves you with less to lose.
When you are done with regret, burn every fucking bridge in sight. Leave them all behind. You won’t miss them, and they will barely notice the distance.
Upshot? Not sure yet, but welling up inside, a sense of abandon, as though an overdue exuberance, a true fearlessness, were chiselling away at the dam wall. Who knew getting old could be such a rush?
Yet for all that, time will bring me back to heel. This is the sobering fact of sixty. I shall not pretend otherwise; which is why I will not mouth ‘just a number’ mush, (as though arrogant, bourgeois catechism could paper over the sea).
Thus, rather than hubris and denial, or grim survival and paralysing dread, I choose acceptance. More than that, deep gratitude and active surrender. Because death is getting closer, the pressure is easing. There is less to plan for. Fewer rainy days to save for. As such, life feels more like a gift. A holiday. The number simply make this plainer.
Tomorrow, when I wake to decade number seven, there will be no fireworks, and very likely no epiphany. But Beauty will speak to me, as she does most days, and by beholding her once more I will adore her.
From there, the choice will be mine. Execute the standard old person brief – dwell in the past, deride the young, cling to sinking life rafts – or go off script. Set sail for the event horizon with a minimum of maps.
I do not mean this to sound heroic, like some lame rock & roll rebel pose, but as a timely reminder. Although my parents, now in their mid-eighties, will assure me that sixty is still young, it feels almost unbelievable to me; despite its processional ordinariness*. According to some metrics, I am now officially old. I am told the government will post me a card confirming this. How on Earth did I get here?
The mirror was ugly this morning. The cadaver I will become clearly visible through ever thinner skin. Just as Beauty walks with me, so too does Death. The day is speeding by, hurtling towards the crash of night.
Yet, Beauty does not minimise. She says: if you are to fall from the sky, why not do so from the greatest possible height? Do not even leave a body behind. Slam into eternity. Obliterate everything.
Who knows, I might just take her up on it.
* I have not previously shared this; but for years I had a gut feeling I would not survive my fifties. Not raging paranoia, just quiet dread. Irrational but insistent. Now, with one day left, relief is washing through – and it feels like permission.
As If You Were Listening 