Courtesy of wikipedia.org
On the eve of my 89th birthday, I saw my doctor for my annual consultation. “You realize you are past your sell-by date, don’t you?”
Well, the doctor didn’t say “sell-by date.” She was too polite. But, she wanted me to know that I had passed the average life expectancy age for a woman living in the United States–which is almost 3 years shorter than what women living in Europe enjoy. One reason for the shorter life expectancy may be that guns kill more females in this country than elsewhere. Overall, the United States is at the 93rd percentile in firearms mortality.
Kissing the edge of 90 is sobering, and I admit my ambitions aren’t as robust as they were when I was 23. The slowdown is to be expected. I have traveled most of my life’s road. Even so, time’s scarcity brings a blessing. With the clutter of ambition gone, what’s important becomes clearer. I no longer fantasize about winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. Awards, like possessions, are the trappings of vanity. Ten years after my death, my dust will be indistinguishable from that of Julius Caesar’s.
Freed from the pretense of posterity, I can focus on the present. At 89, I feel a profound responsibility for each moment, knowing I can make it better or worse, and that in those subtle inches of time, I affect the future.
For everyone, life is a rutted road. A majority of us struggle to keep our chins above the poverty line. Ironically, those with less have a greater capacity to give, and that empathy makes them richer than they realize.
The wealthy face different challenges. To maintain their status in the social hierarchy, they compete with others, often turning potential friends into adversaries. I wonder if they question whether the wealth and power they pursue will make them happy. Is Elon Musk more joyful today as a trillionaire than he was when he earned his first billion? Does he realize his riches place him outside the mainstream of human experience, isolating him as an oddity among his kind?
Wealth and power can ignite unattainable ambitions that end in disappointment. For example, reporters describe an exchange between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping in which these leaders dream of extending their lives through organ transplants. As both have built their careers on the bones of their victims, that ambition reveals enormous ignorance. What fool aspires to a few more years simply to endure public scorn?
Longings for immortality run contrary to a universe devoted to change and impermanence. Death and Oblivion come for everyone. Only the fusty historian remembers the name of the first leader of the Shang Dynasty.
If we are lucky, age teaches us that consciousness is all we possess. Like a lemur that leaps from branch to branch, it extends itself between breaths—a gift too fragile to occupy space and too precious to be measured like gold.
What are we to do with this treasure? On the surface, the choice seems obvious. Awareness is a tool either for good or ill. We unravel the mystery of ourselves each time we choose. That is what we learn in old age, and all we need to learn.
Does self-knowledge matter in the end? I haven’t a clue. Still, after living for 89 years, I’ve decided to share the wisdom I have gleaned. We are richest when we are kind.
