Sunday, May 30, 2010

Reflections On 65

If you would, please indulge me in some thoughts of a more personal commentary. Last weekend, I hit another one of those birthday milestones. Admittedly, 65 does not have quite the be-all connotation it once had. Enrollment in Medicare arrives, but full-benefit Social Security retirement is now delayed to age 66. AARP enrolls you at 55; retailers offer senior discounts anywhere from 55 to 65; you can retire early with a partial social security benefit at 62. Conversely, mandatory retirement age in many companies has been pushed back towards age 70. Nevertheless, “65” still has that aura of being the doorway to senior citizenship status – a status with an ever-enlarging peer group.

From my vantage, there are really four key birthdays that are important to notice. The first is your Day1 original birthday when living starts. All the world is brand-new, frightening in its newness given your quick realization that you have no immediate context or self-coping skills for this existence other than inherited instincts. So the next 20 years are spent trying to figure out the structure and makeup of this human life, and the tools needed to survive – if not thrive – in it. The tools we ultimately choose are quite individual to our experiences, outcomes and the scope of our worldly education from those early years.

Which brings us to the 21 milestone. We have loaded ourselves (for better or worse) with what we think will be effective tools for making it in this world, coupled with what we think is a good understanding of how life works and the rules of the game.  Then we set out on what we believe is our path to follow – maybe even with some glimmer of what the path’s end is supposed to look like. We rent apartments and buy houses, get jobs, begat a family, serve as parents, earn money and pay bills, and try to leave some room for fun along the way.

Until somewhere around 40, the 3rd major milestone. (For some it is as early as 30, or as late as 50, but this milestone inevitably shows up somewhere.) We have been diligently following our path, using our tools. But now we have a track record we can assess. And that assessment begins to raise doubts. Was this the right path for me, or were other choices possible which I may have denied or not even seen? Did my toolkit have the right tools in it, and/or did I use the right ones at the right moment in the right circumstance? Was my earlier understanding of life accurate, or did I miss a couple of key elements in that understanding? Have I been riding life’s wave, avoiding life’s wave, or has the wave been riding me? Doubts arise, basic truths get questioned, and dread grows that we may have locked ourselves into a play in which our role actually belongs to someone else.

In this phase we may plunge on and reach our greatest heights professionally as our hard work to date on this path begins to pay off. Or we may abruptly change directions to head down a different road, making a dramatic change as the only way out of the current play and into another. Or we make an uneasy truce – achieving a level of success on the current path yet all the while knowing that our ground work is weakening, out principles are bending, our needs are shifting. That which we previously clung to so tightly begins to move as we loosen our grip. Over time, recognition grows that our life is unfailingly morphing to a different place.

And then we reach 65, a progressive journey to a milestone that demands a choice: to hang on stubbornly to what was, or to let go what is no longer really important or truly needed and move into a clearer view of what one’s own life is really about.

Change has been pretty much a constant through my entire life. Surprisingly so, given my upbringing. At 21, 65 was a number with which I had no connection or meaning. At 40, 65 was a number visible on the radar but always still out there in the future, yet increasingly a marker of time left on a ticking clock. So much left to do.

But here I am. Arriving at 65, it is not the disaster I had once anticipated. Nor is it an end to life’s journey, though maybe a necessary end of what has gone before. It instead serves as a door opening into yet another phase of never-ending change. Jobs end, but careers continue even if in new forms. Doubts about what I could possibly do after 65 yield to doubts about how/what I will do with the opportunities in front of me. What I have learned yields to what is still to be learned.

My physical stamina is definitely reduced from 5 years ago. The soreness from a day working to maintain this mountain refuge takes a little longer to ebb. The impending finiteness of my life is more real to me now, given that 82% of my 79-year old life expectancy has already statistically expired. But death is not as frightening a prospect as it once was, though the manner of my death remains a concern. The timing is pretty much out of my hands.

I know the physical side of my life from this point will get progressively more difficult. That is a shame, since I just now feel like I am really understanding what my life is about. (As with the old saying, it is a shame that youth is wasted on the young!) I keep hearing that we are supposed to live “in the now.” Yet right now I have an advantage of seeing and understanding from an informed lifetime of experiences, answers, and learning. I think it is important to draw on those as I live through my now-ness.

65 is a milestone. One that demands a pause for deep reflection before proceeding. Because this upcoming phase can be radically different from all those many birthdays of before. My reflection says that life is pretty darn good right now. A settled-ness, clarity and peace not experienced before. And if I am perceiving current clues and insights correctly, what awaits around this corner can be better than ever. So I am embracing this latest change. And so would I similarly hope for you, at whatever your age.

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