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I swore I would not do this, that I would not write about turning 60, that I would not catalogue and comment upon the thousand shocks that 60-year old flesh is heir to — back fat, love handles, less-than-prim erections, random mechanical joint aches, ear hair, nose hair, wavering hearing volumes, wavering vision sharpness, a supine appetite, and 991 more — and yet here I am writing about them. Why?
It's not that I find any heartening humor in these things, unlike the barrage of forwarded emails my mother sends me of the "You know you're a geezer when — " variety. Nor do I find any philosophic comfort in contemplating my aging — I don't find any particular wisdom emanating from it, nor any dispensation, as if I've lived a good life and it's time to let the generations behind me live theirs while I rest on my accumulated laurels, blah blah blah. And the complaining — I have fellow sexagenarians who complain about this and that connected to their aging, and it's depressing to hear the medical litanies, the regurgitated Bette Davis line about "growing old is not for sissies," the lamentations about nostalgia and timidities about technology and over-concern about meal times and gastric problems.
So, again, why?
For me, this coming decade feels fraught — I don't know any other word for it. Rather than feeling accomplished about anything I've done in my life, I feel anxious that I've barely gotten started on creating anything worth leaving behind. I feel that despite a laudable discipline in pursuing my various enthusiasms, I've never amalgamated them into something that someone else would find worth their time to tie themselves to and cherish.
(And does that matter? Is that a sign of failure? What does that tie validate in what I've done? Is the problem in me or in them? Is there a problem at all? These questions and others like them plague me as well.)
I now find being me unrelaxing, and I imagine it might be that way for people close to me. More and more, I lack an openness about and a trust in life — life is something to be conquered, life is a matter of having done enough to satisfy some judge (and knowing that the judge will never be satisfied), it is about a kind of grinding discipline that has no real joy in it either in the moment or in the accomplishment. To just "let be" without a Plan B — not possible for me, which I think deprives me of serendipity — it all depends on my to-do list, which is the opposite of the serendipitous.
All of this is, at heart, a spiritual problem — a strange thing for an atheist to say, but true — "spiritual" in the sense of finding a satisfaction in living that can outsmart and fend off the oblivion that is living's sole and permanent certainty. This has been a problem for me all my life — to find pleasure and joy where I am existentially that feels like "enough," within which I can sit and feel comfort and completion and calm. (The rare time I feel this is when I've just enough wine to blunt the grind yet still be physically capable — the alcohol turns off the puritanical neurons and life feels expansive and unthreatening.)
But then (I think) — perhaps the jaggedness I feel in my life is meant to be that way, that that is the way I have to live because I am constituted as I am, and I should learn how to use it well rather than complain about the work and doubt and dislocation it causes me.
This conclusion sits well with me, but I don't know if it does because it's right or because I'm too lazy to do the necessary course corrections. It feels right because it feels real. I find myself most at peace when I'm working on a project like the "videos" I've been posting on YouTube for the theatre company because I have accomplished something new and interesting, thus pleasing myself. Yet I also feel annoyed that they don't kick off anything when we announce them — why aren't people more interested in something good? (And then I counter with, "Well, maybe they aren't that good," which provokes a counter-counter about "It's as good as, and better than, most of the crap that's out there" — at which point the discussion has slipped away from the video and into the land of dueling irritations with a geezerish tone. Back away, back away!)
The only thing that brings some leaven into this counter-counter-counter is humor — something that self-deprecates without also diminishing the efforts and accomplishments, that is true humor and not anger masked, that can be ironic without irony's underlying despair and dismay. This is the only thing that ever brings me into a balance — it's my form of finding balance, though one that comes from a kind of see-sawing (jerky and almost ungovernable) rather than meditative harmony (which I always find temporary and unable to stand up to strong winds and noisy encounters).
It is true that I am still enough of a residual Catholic to want to find Eden, where all this struggle will end and peace will reign. I also suspect that Eden is incredibly boring and not at all conducive to imagination — and is, in its own way, as empty of ultimate meaning as I find in my life and life in general (though it can certainly have local meaning, and has to, or else why persist in living at all — a question to be answered at another time).
As the clock turns over to beyond 60, the only grace that will be a saving one is to find humor and apply it liberally and not take the serious stuff so seriously — or take it as seriously as it needs to be taken, give it its proper honor and respect, and use the humor to at least keep the despair at bay if it can't blunted or amended.
Consider 60 a nice, safe speed — it will get you where you need to go.
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