Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing those you hold well.
Josh Billings
There is poignancy to our last third of life that is difficult to know and understand until one gets to it. It takes time.
Several months ago I wrote about wabi-sabi, a Japanese expression for appreciating the beauty of impermanence (e.g., the old wooden bannister worn smooth by thousands of hands over the years). Implicit in wabi-sabi is the passage of time. Teenagers attempt but fail to achieve this appreciation through buying pre-faded or pre-ripped jeans. There’s no getting around that it takes time.
As time passes, the poignancy is more intense and heartfelt. I used to just try to get from point A to point B, but as I slow down a bit and start to actually feel the journey itself, I have started to appreciate what an awesome experience this physical existence has been. Awesome, as in awe — a jaw dropping, noetic experience.
The movie Collateral Beauty, currently playing at the Lake Theatre, quotes Albert Einstein saying that time is an illusion. Time is a gift not to be wasted. The film, starring Will Smith, is partly about the important conversations we usually avoid and the importance of relationship. A parent whose 6-year-old daughter has died of cancer, Smith’s character is immobilized and crippled by grief. In an exchange with a grief counselor, Smith laments, “I have to fix my head!” and the response is “Your daughter died. You can’t fix your head.”
In the recent movie Arrival, the main character (Amy Adams), a linguist communicating with recently-arrived extraterrestrials, has an epiphany regarding time, which causes her to exclaim, “Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace every moment of it and welcome it.”
These are two good examples of why the question we need to pose regarding our own aging and death is, “How are we going to behave toward them?” rather than “What are we going to do about them?”
Like Adams’ character, we generally know the journey and where it leads. However, we don’t usually choose to embrace and welcome it. And like Smith’s character, we can’t fix our inevitable aging and death.
Last year I saw an advertising billboard along the highway that read “Take care of your body; it’s where you live.” We should certainly be wise about our physical health, especially as we age. There’s no question that this can make a big difference in the quality of our lives.
But our aging and death are not problems to be fixed. It is our intention and our consciousness that can help us play the cards that we hold, and play them well.
Marc Blesoff is a former Oak Park village trustee, co-founder of the Windmills softball organization, co-creator of Sunday Night Dinner, a retired criminal defense attorney, and a novice beekeeper. He currently facilitates Conscious Aging Workshops and Wise Aging Workshops in the Chicagoland area.