Tomorrow is my birthday. You get one guess for how old I’ll be, with these two clues to help you. It is a prime number and if I live to be 100, tomorrow I will have lived exactly 2/3 of my life. I doubt I’ll live to be 100, but I did have a great-grandmother who lived to be 98, so you never know.
When I look in the mirror, I definitely look my age. I look my age so much that some younger faculty over the last few years occasionally ask in conversation, directly or indirectly, whether I am intending to retire soon. My answer is always “No,” usually followed by “I’m intending to die in the classroom.” At the same time I am thinking “I’m going to report you to the authorities for ageism. I’ll bet I can teach the pants off of you, you young punk!”
Although I do look my age and I don’t blame my uninformed colleagues for their rude question (much), I do not feel my age at all. I won’t go so far as to say that sixties are the new forties, but I could certainly endorse their being the new fifties. I have felt 10-12 years younger than the calendar says that I am for a long time—I blame it on a lost decade during my 20s when the only good thing that happened is that my two sons were born. I’ve been making up time ever since.
This past year, though, has contained a few reminders that I am getting older. My right knee and right elbow hurt most of the time for no other reason than that they have been used a lot for decades and are wearing out. I fell on my bicycle last June and ended up with 30 stitches over my right eye. That could have happened to me at 25, I suppose, but it got me to thinking about my mortality more than usual, especially when people found it helpful to keep telling me that it could have been a lot worse.
Then in the middle two weeks of January I was as sick as I can ever remember being. It wasn’t Covid—I’ve had Covid and this was much worse. Jeanne was away the whole time I was sick, so I had only Bovina to feel sorry for me. Bovina would occasionally jump up into my lap, look me straight in the eye as is her custom, and ask “Are you going to die? If you are, would you please make sure my food and water bowls are full before you do?” I waited far too long to contact my GP about being sick because I’ve always been able to kick such illnesses just by ignoring them. But this one would not be ignored—indicating that maybe my cure-myself-by-ignoring-the-fact-that-I-am-sick strategy isn’t working as well as it used to.
But I have very little to complain about and much to be thankful for. And the older I get, the more I realize that how my days go has a lot to do with my attitude. A few years ago, Jeanne took me to see “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” at our downtown performing arts center. It was wonderful; the hundreds of people in attendance mostly looked like Jeanne and me—aging hippie refugees from the sixties. Carole King’s “Tapestry” was one of the first albums I ever purchased; her music was a cherished part of the soundtrack of my youth.
The show ends with Carole King sitting at a grand piano during a 1971 Carnegie Hall concert, her first performance in front of a live audience. She sings “Beautiful,” which is one of my King favorites.
You’ve got to get up every morning with a smile in your face
And show the world all the love in your heart
Then people gonna treat you better, you’re gonna find, yes you will
That you’re beautiful, as you feel
As the ancient Stoics and the contemporary Existentialists tell us, although we cannot control what the world sends us, we can control how we will process and respond to it. How I approach the world is a choice, and I choose—when I have my wits about me sufficiently to remember—life and love. I choose not to be afraid. I embrace Iris Murdoch’s definition of freedom:
To be free is something like this: to exist sanely without fear and to perceive what is real.
As I’ve learned over the past decade or more to embrace an evolving faith rather than to struggle against it, I’ve found it more possible to find the divine in the ordinary, in the pleasures of daily life in the classroom, with Jeanne, with our corgi Bovina, screaming at the top of my lungs with 12,000-plus rabid fans at a basketball game. And I realize that I’m finding the divine more and more often because I’ve become more and more comfortable as an incarnated being.
The central claim of my faith is that the primary way the divine gets into the world is—despite our mistakes, flaws, imperfections, and downright evil—in human form. The older I get, the more I accept that when it comes to getting the divine into the world, I’m it. And so are you. It goes with the territory.
So here’s what I want from you for my birthday. I want you to embrace your humanity. Fully, without reservation. Because in doing that, you are embracing something much bigger than yourself.
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