On Turning 60

There.  I said it.  I'm 60.  I turned 60 last week.  Don't ever let anyone tell you it's not traumatic.  If you're less than 50, 50 ain't nuthin'.  If you're less than 40, 40 is a breeze.  And if you're under 30 and you think 30 is a big deal, don't make me laugh! You know, I just realized, I've owned my first house longer than you've been around.  60 is a big deal.  It's one that really makes you take stock, and that's what I've been doing lately.  60 makes you ask questions like, what have I done that matters?  What have I accomplished that matters?  And whether the answer is a whole long list of things or if the answer is "not much", does that even matter? 
Well, those are questions that I will leave for philosophers to ponder.  I'm not up to thinking about them right now.  And, of course, there are other times in my life when I have asked those same questions.  Most people do that.  On the other hand, that was before I had passed three-quarters of my life expectancy.  But this birthday has afforded a different and new perspective I think.  It enables me to view the life I've lived compared to the life that I might have once planned for myself.  You can't do that until you reach a stage in life when a large portion of your life is actually past. 
I have a very distinct memory of being in my late teens or maybe early twenties.  It was the early or mid-seventies maybe.  I don't know why, but I was thinking about people living in certain times of history.  What was it like, for those who were alive then, to pass from the 19th to the 20th centuries?  And then, what would it be like for me to pass from the 20th to the 21st?  I thought, "I'll be 47 in the year 2000.  What will that be like?  What will the world be like?  What will my life be like?"  I wondered if a white house with a picket fence and "two cats in the yard" as the old Graham Nash tune suggests, would be in that picture?  Being 47 was so unimaginable when I was 20 and now, even it is long in the rear-view mirror.  And it happened so incredibly fast.  Now, in hindsight, I can see that what I might have thought then that I would do for a career was wrong.  I thought then, or assumed at least, that by the time I was 47 I'd be married with kids.  That was wrong.  When I think about even the vague notions I had then of  how my life would turn out, they were virtually all wrong.  But now that I look back on that, I am actually quite comfortable with it.  And I'm beginning to think that becoming comfortable with your past and the path your life has taken, is one of the keys to surviving 60.  I think the difficulty a lot of people have with getting older isn't just the realization that they are on the down side of life, it is the angst they feel about what was and even more, what might have been different.  Woody Allen said, "My one regret in life is that I am not someone else".
A number of years ago I ran across a poem that I take out and read from time to time.  It's by a St. Louis born poet and Pulitzer Prize winner named Carl Dennis from his book Practical Gods. The poem is called The God Who Loves You.  What is so appealing about it to me, is that, as one commentator put it, the poet deftly changes the focus "from our own anguish at missed opportunities to the grief of the god who loves us".  In other words, the poem presents an image, not of us reviewing and perhaps regretting the paths we have chosen, but God, who can see all the possibilities that we never even knew about. 

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

Now, some might see the poet's point of view as apostate.  I don't know what Mr. Dennis's beliefs are.  But as a person who believes in God and believes that he is interested in me personally, I give Carl Dennis the benefit of the doubt, because he so effectively answers the nagging doubt that many people have when they reflect on the life they've lived.  He presents the question of dealing with "what ifs" not in terms of "I guess we'll never know", but of actually knowing, and back comes the answer, "so what?".  The simple truth is, there are no "do-overs" and we might as well give in to that fact.  What you do today and the path you have taken is what matters, not what you might have done yesterday or some other path that never was.  "Sit down and write about the life you can talk about with a claim to authority" is his advice.  What is past is past and what "might have been" will never be, and the path your life has taken cannot be changed. In the end, contemplating "the difference between what is and what could have been" is a waste of time and can only bring us the grief of the God who loves us.  So those are my thoughts as I turn 60.  I do not offer them as a "gather ye rosebuds while ye may" sentiment because by the time you reach 60 you have already strolled past many of the rose gardens of your life.  It was John Lennon who said, "Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans".  For each of us, there are many paths that our lives could take.  There is no single path that is "correct".  We often wonder what it would be like to "see the future".  Except there are an infinite number of possible futures for each of us, but only one single past, "the life you've witnessed, which for all you know is the life you've chosen".