Every stage of life brings with it, the lessons and transitions (the gifts really, fluttering like confetti) of the stages that came before, as well as those that may be yet to come. I find this so comforting as I age, especially as my physical aging is outstripping my mental aging by quite a significant margin! (I suffer with Young Onset Parkinson's Disease.) A pleasant surprise, for me, has been how much I have enjoyed each new decade of life more than the one before--for a miscellany of reasons--but possibly the biggest reason is the growing personal power I discover with each turn of the aging wheel.
Perhaps it was spending such a great deal of my childhood in the company of my Grandmother. I think I learned, early, to notice and internalize the changes that lay ahead without fearing them, or disrespecting them. But, as much as I may notice the losses, I seldom see the gains until pleasantly surprised by them when they come to me. As I approached my fifties, for instance, I began to realize a certain personal fearlessness that came to me by way of loss rather than gain. It was as if large rocks of fear were falling away from the mountain of my life, leaving behind the crags and deep grooves of understanding, while clearing the pebble-lain view behind me and showing the pathway to the future as uphill, but climbable.
It was as I approached my forties that I first noticed what I later came to term the, “Age of Mortality.” Sixty seems to be about the age when this phase of life kicks in. I’ve seen so many of my older family and friends go through it--the dawning realization that, “I, too, shall die.” Memories become so important at this age. Things lose their significance, while people gain theirs. Photographs become very important, as do family dinners, gatherings, and rituals.
Now, in my early fifties, I have a slightly better understanding of the final phase of life--what I term, the “Age of Simplicity.” Our needs dial down to the simpler aspects of living, our wants soften to the blissfully uncluttered, and our days become more about the basics than the day-to-day drama’s of the prior Ages. (Which, I have termed, The Ages of Innocence, Development, Energy, and Wisdom, respectively. These stages of life are flanked, on either side, of course, by the Age of Mystery--before life and after death.)
Each person enters and exits the various phases of life in their own time and at their own pace, of course. How thrilling and interesting this makes living! Especially as everything is a “Circle Within a Circle.” Each Age has its own internal Ages--each year, day, and so-on. The trick is, to be aware of where we ourselves might be at any given time and to have the foresight to see that, “this, too, shall pass”--not to mention the hindsight to see that, “what has passed, shaped the past.”
The interesting thing about navigating our way through the phases of life, is that we never do this completely alone--there is always someone walking the path with us. Often, several someone’s walk the tricky steps we are taking--both behind and ahead--helping us navigate the terrain. And so it is, we have others to look to when moments of doubt or uncertainty occur, a milestone is to be celebrated, or some much needed healing needs to come.
I suppose it is this fundamental understanding that others are making their way through these stages of life too, that gives me a deep and abiding respect for every age and every generation. I do not disregard the restlessness and fire present in a young woman in the Age of Energy, for instance. All that hot-headedness and passion is energy that is present for a reason and that reason has a lot more to do with the woman she will become than the one she is right now. Nor, for example, would I dismiss an elderly man in the Age of Simplicity as, “just” an old man, or think him stupid because he is becoming hard of hearing. There is a wealth of knowledge in both the young and the old--the trick is, being smart enough to see it, look for it, and get to know it.
So, we have the Ages of Innocence, Development, Understanding, Energy, Wisdom, Mortality, Simplicity, and finally, Mystery. Each stage has its challenges and rewards. Each can be universal and still uniquely individual and deeply personal. In each stage, a person could and should learn, not just from the stages that came before, but if they are very smart, the stages that seem, to them, a lifetime away.
As an illustration of this, I look back at my own childhood... I was very young (in the Age of Innocence) when I first began to internalize a feeling of being undervalued, less than lovable, self conscious, and unimportant. These feelings of “not belonging,” or being “left out,” persisted well into my teens (the Age of Understanding) and even into my early twenties (the Age of Energy) and they stayed with me until, as I slowly came into the Age of Wisdom, I was at last able to look back and see things more clearly and, perhaps most importantly, more compassionately.
My Mother had five children, all in rapid succession, and all when she was very young. She was in her teens (Understanding) when she first became a Mother and had her last child at age 25 (Energy). Knowing, as I do now, what a mammoth task it is to raise one child well if you have not had the chance to develop and grow yourself, I can completely understand the overwhelming burden it must have been for my Mother trying to raise five children when she was so young. She had the appropriate energy for the task, but had missed much of her own chances for healthy maturity and development because she was interrupted in her natural growth by having babies way before she was ready.
Of course she could not properly nurture five children! It was all she could do to keep us clean and fed! Furthermore, she had robbed herself of her own natural course of development and maturity by taking on a burden she simply was not ready for at that time. No wonder she often tuned her children out, slept in when she should have been getting us ready for school, and left us to fend for ourselves with unkempt clothes and unwashed hair. Sunday night was “bath night” and, naturally, money was tight, so we had to take turns sharing progressively dirty bath water. Weeks would go by before the sheets were changed on our beds because laundry was done by hand once a week and that left little time or inclination for the washing of every dirty thing in the house!
For his part, my Father worked as hard as he could for as long as he could but, he too fell afoul of unwise choices--having babies when he was neither matured or developed enough to do so. By the time he was 45, mental illness had robbed him of his ability to hold down a job at all.
I carried around anger and resentment over my childhood for many years--until, finally, I began to enter the Age of Wisdom. This is not necessarily the time when we acquire wisdom, but it is the time when we begin to. I began to see things from my Mother’s point of view. With this change in perspective came the understanding that my Mother did not neglect some of our needs out of lack of care, she did so out of lack of maturity.
I have been volunteering for years with abused and neglected children and I have long since learned that, though our care was less than ideal, we were never neglected to the point of abuse and we were, in countless ways, quite well taken care of. Having so many children so young meant that, quite often, my parents had to rely on the older kids to watch out for the younger ones and the middle kid--me--was low rung on the needs ladder. The youngest children had the most immediate needs and the older children were more capable of helping to meet them--I was, for the most part, able to fend for myself. But, of course, I realize now that I did not completely fend for myself--my Grandmother was with me every step of the way.
I also realize that, not a year went by that my parents did not take us on vacation to the “seaside,” at least once, often twice. We had wonderful Christmases and never felt a lack of security--we always knew our parents were there for us, were never physically or emotionally abused, and were lucky enough to be raised by two people who loved and supported each other unconditionally.
The understanding I have of my Mother, now that I have the benefit of maturity and growing wisdom, is so much richer and more deeply woven than I would ever have been capable of even imagining thirty or forty years ago. I was too young and immature in The Age of Development to grasp anything more than my own perception of being inadequate, unloved, and unwanted. There was no room in the Age of Understanding for me to do more than “understand” that my Mother had done a very poor job of raising her children! There was no time, in The Age of Energy, for me to soften my rage enough to see past the fact that my Mother was just like me when she was having her babies--I was not capable of cooling the fires of righteous indignation long enough to understand that there was way, way more to her situation than I could see then. It took time, experience, and walking a long, long mile in other people’s shoes, to understand that the steps we take on the pathway of life are not to be judged too harshly by others, especially if others have never made the same walk.
So you see, this is where it all comes Full Circle. I am now my Grandmother... trying, just as she did, to counsel the next generation not to be too harsh on the generation that came before. I am my Mother, imploring the young to, “be kind.” I am the dying breath of reason, floating away on the newborn cries of the unreasonable, watching as change comes and the children grow and learn. Watching, as those Developing begin to Understand, use that understanding to motivate their Energy, find Wisdom along the path, before paring it all down to the beauty and eloquence of pure Simplicity... The rest, remains a Mystery, but this is good, because it so properly completes the endless Circles of Life.
