Precious Moments

Waves of Joy In Old Age

**Language trigger. I swear in this**

This is me in 1979. I don’t remember the month and I only know the year because of the house depicted in the photo. I wasn’t naked. I had on shorts and a tube top. My husband (at that time) took the photo and suggested I look into the burning stick of incense meaningfully, so I tried to be thoughtful as I gazed into the flame. At that time in my life, being thoughtful was a concept and not really much of a practice.

I was 17 and probably 47 seconds or so from conceiving my second son. Since the age of ten, I had been running on a sort of frantic operating system of managing crises and putting out fires, the kind not on the end of an incense stick. Mom was forever in the hospital and someone had to run her household. In the 70s, that meant the oldest daughter and I was both the oldest and the only daughter. I married at 16 and already had Joe, my first son, at that time.

Neither I nor my first husband, who had an upbringing even more broken than mine, had any clue what we were doing. I knew how to do things, but I did not know how to be a caring, compassionate, whole human being. I was too busy frantically trying to glue back on the pieces of me that were falling off faster than I could keep up with them.

I was putting in time. I had essentially applied for a job I wanted, submitted a resume that was total bullshit, inventing my qualifications, and now I was in the job and had no clue how to perform it. I stayed that way for the next forty years and change. Hell, I still don’t know what I’m doing most of the time.

I wonder if being old means that you no longer pretend that you know what you’re doing and just embrace the ineptitude.

Here is what I know.

Sometimes, pretty often in fact, the wind blows a certain way and the temperature is a certain perfect degree and nothing is falling apart and the sweetness of it nearly knocks me down.

Fortunately, it happens pretty often lately.

I was never a person who cried much. I wasn’t one of those folks who do the pretty cry over a nice Kodak commercial. If I did cry, I would let myself seriously break bad with it, going all out into full body wracking sobs for a half hour or so and then figure out what to do about whatever made me cry. A good bit of the time, what I figured out to do was to put away whatever I was feeling and do my best to make the people around me feel more satisfied.

Growing up, I learned that if people around me are dissatisfied, someone is going to get hit. That trained me to do whatever it takes to make everyone stay in their lane and agree that all is well even if all is very much not well.

As you can imagine, that conditioned response did not serve me all that well.

I think the fire burned it all out of me. Four years ago, the Caldor fire got aggressive enough that we started to get concerned and today is the 4th anniversary of us putting whatever we could into our cars and driving away from our home of nearly 20 years for the last time.

That experience was something I could not even begin to manage. I couldn’t blame anyone, although there was a great deal to say about the delayed responses of CalFire and the forestry department who spent way too long throwing rock, paper, scissors over who had jurisdiction over this rapidly growing brush fire. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t make anything OK, much less everything OK.

I was finally so far outside of my skill set that the metaphorical job application might as well have burned up as my desk at home did. It took over 40 years, but at last, I was found out. I was a fraud who couldn’t really fix anything at all, despite putting up a great front most of the time.

That level of surrender was life-changing for me. I enjoyed the illusion of having some kind of control over my life and sure, I do wish I could go back to that level of innocence. I don’t enjoy being cynical. I was happier when I thought that even if we disagreed, most people are good. Those rose colored glasses are now long cracked on the asphalt and run over by a semi. Now I know how unbelievably special it is when you find someone who is kind and compassionate and fun to be around.

There is danger in isolating from the world, especially as we get into the later years of life. We need people who notice if we are gone and who will check in on us. And yet, I now, isolate as much as I possibly can. One of the many reasons Eric and I retired early was I found the degree of exposure and vulnerability I felt in running a store to be unbearable.

Now that I am accustomed to frequently being alone or somewhat alone, those moments of nearly unbearable bliss come more frequently and tend to last a few seconds longer. Sometimes, they are so strong that I feel like whatever energy point in my body is connecting with them is a hook of some kind and the force of the glory of that moment will pull me up into the heavens.

I was never a crier for the most part but now the quicktears sometimes come as the force of those moments overwhelms me. I think about that beautiful sentiment channeled by Reva Christ, “In the stillness you will know me, in the light you will find me, in your hearts I have made myself a home.”

Maybe this sense of stillness is something that prepares us for the grave. Maybe these waves of pleasure are some neurons shorting out in anticipation of a cataclysmic neurological event. Maybe I am just so grateful to still be here after all the trauma of four years ago and three years ago that I cannot contain the joy of it and it is taking me over.

Maybe it is the pleasure of mostly just not giving a fuck anymore but it is also true that once you get over that major hurdle, you begin to care so very deeply. It is certainly the fuckless paradox… or is it the fuckless paradise? Or is it both, creating yet another paradox?

Something like 35 or so years ago, I had a friend named Nan. Nan lived approximately 5 hours north of me and we met through mutual friends. She was beautiful and magical and smart and energetic, so I would drive the long distance to visit with her for a weekend now and then.

The problem was that she’d had a near death experience and it was so beautiful that when she came back and landed in her body again, she was profoundly angry about being back. That anger permeated almost every aspect of her life and I have to admit, it was extremely challenging to be around. It was triggering for me because as I mentioned before, people who are volatile or angry activate that primal duck and cover response cultivated in me as a child. I finally had to distance completely, which was not difficult since she never seemed to attach securely onto people.

If what I experience during those blissful moments is at all related to something in the afterlife, that beautiful place that Nan went to, I am glad it makes me happier to be alive rather than resentful to be on earth. I understand there were reasons beyond that experience that caused Nan to be so incredibly unhappy being alive but wow, that resentment she felt seriously amped up those other instigators.

I have often wondered what happened to her and if she ever made it back to that place that impressed her so much. I hope she did and that it welcomed her with open arms because I have not in my entire life met a human who was so painfully angry about being here.

I never felt these waves of specific precious moments as a younger person (meaning adult and child… just younger than now) and I cherish them. It is lovely to be still and identify that this moment is sacred… and this one is as well… and oh look, there’s another one.

I still feel anxiety that is occasionally quite intense. I still get sad and frustrated and angry and afraid. I don’t think a person can ever be so enlightened that they do not feel those things when it is appropriate to feel those things. If our goal is to escape all uncomfortable human emotion, why would we bother to be human?

Mixed in amongst those feelings and the spaces in between are those precious moments of bliss and I am thankful that I got to feel them in my life. I don’t know if that is old person related or what, but there it is.

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