You and I Are Too Old To Resent or Resist Revisions
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
Like it or not we’re in constant revision, and that’s great news
It’s almost 5 am here in Oregon. Outside the birds are preceding the dawn, spring is in full blossom. Yesterday I started the irritating but wonderful process of getting ready for a new trip with brand-new gear.
I’ve been down for a while now, my active adventure career sidelined as I have had twelve surgeries- major ones - pockmark my life. It’s all good, although the real adventure has been learning to survive the procedures and get back on my feet, and learn to walk again.
It’s been impossible to train regularly with one foot in a boot, forever being in PT and recovery, and the sometimes mind-bending pain. Many of you can relate. That said, all of these are revisions, all of them necessary if I want to keep moving, being active and exploring the world.
We wake up new every day, we excrete what is used and old. What a pity we can’t rid ourselves of bad thoughts and attitudes the same way we can eliminate our waste.
Revisions are part of life, like it or not. As much as many of us really dislike change, we can’t avoid it. Those changes we choose, like marriage, kids and the like bring with them inevitable additional changes we believe we didn’t sign up for.
A new puppy for me means all kinds of scheduling issues, boarding issues, changes in how I live my life and work my day.
All of a sudden I can’t write as much as I liked. What did I expect? In exchange for all that love, she needs exercise, training and socialization, just like I do. I signed up for this. Life revisions.
Of course it’s inconvenient.
However you tell me how inconvenient she is when she greets me with all the enthusiasm in the world first thing in the morning before our walk, smothering me with kisses.
Two lives saved.
Mika, the new puppy, is now mine officially. Yesterday was the last of the two-week trial period, and she spent it with me in my basement as I unpacked and set up the new tent. I’m testing this tent for a manufacturer during a river trip in two weeks, so I needed the practice.
Mika approved, and in so approving, appropriated my new tent.
As with all things, there is a breaking-in period. No matter how many tents (or puppies) you’ve raised, a new one is always a bit of a mystery. If you’re like me, you feel a little foolish as you stick the wrong end of this into the wrong end of that, and fail to notice, natch, that this is red bit to match THIS red bit so that you wouldn’t do that very thing.
Ohfercryingoutloud.
I am reminded regularly that I am a constant and often reluctant beginner. But beginnings are a permanent part of life, and thank god for that. We can begin something the day we die. And in fact, I believe that something else does begin upon our death. What that is, who knows?
Having a puppy, perhaps like having a baby, is learning to see things differently. Mika is fascinated no end by the sprinklers and can’t wait to get outside when she hears them start up. Let’s go bite the water!
Everything is a miracle to her. That’s a reminder to me that everything’s a miracle or nothing’s a miracle. It’s how we frame things that we miss the message. Life itself is the greatest miracle. So many of us are marching sleepless through it, utterly blind to daily, tiny miracles of bloom and bud and beginnings.
The miracles of endings which make room for more beginnings.
wrote about the tree damage from a tornado as well as changes in her life after the death of her husband of fifty years.I take tree deaths personally. Up here in Oregon, our increasing heat waves are taking out plenty of them, even as the tornadoes take out trees where Joan lives. Nature can be cruel, and She takes.
She took Joan’s husband too.
Joan didn’t sign up to be alone this late in life, but for many women the inevitability of a husband’s death before our own is one of life’s hardest lessons. As I celebrate a brand new life, a lively puppy who loves the bright red laser spot toy I just got for her, I also know that in ten years or so I will face her passing.
Two close friends of mine had planned trips to visit my ever-changing house this year, both of them had to cancel because of elderly dogs. One’s husband simply can’t cope; his elderly Golden is thirteen and in pain, and likely past the point where it would have been kind to give him a gentle death. The man refuses to let go.
Each of us has strong opinions on such things if we’re animal owners, but for the sake of this article, this is the husband’ utter inability to accept a revision in his life, a life without his boy.
Not all of us can accept life’s revisions gracefully. We often resist them with all we have, because we can’t believe that what’s coming might be better than what we have now. As one friend likes to say,
better the hell we know than the heaven we don’t.
As hard as it can be at times, I choose the heaven I don’t know yet. Not all the time, but I’m working on that.
As Mika settled into my new tent and called it hers, she unwittingly has settled into my life as I call her mine. My clean and neat house compulsion is out the window for as long as she lives here, a revision to one aspect of my household in exchange for a great need for puppy love.
When we change, part of it is painful because we are effectively saying goodbye to,or even renouncing, as it were, a part of life we have lived.
Something has to die for something else to come into being: a way of seeing, a way of living, a way of life.
Something has to be forfeited, denied, or buried for the next thing to show up.
This is what I mean when I say we must pay for something. There is always a price.
When we marry someone we marry who they are right then, not necessarily who they will be in fifty years. The great Billy Joel sang about this: loving us just the way we are. Sometimes who we become is not what our friends, family and partners signed up for. Often ignorant of how much we ourselves have changed, we want our people to stay who they are.
That gives us the false sense that things aren’t going to change and we don’t have to.
Fans of Fried Green Tomatoes will remember the transformation of Kathy Bates’ character Evelyn Couch as she is influenced by Idgie’s story. Her lout of a husband is perplexed and annoyed, but ultimately evolves with her. She was a gift that it took him a while to understand.
Not all of us can, but the invitation is always there.
So yes. We are born into a time of endings, but by definition, we are also born into a time of beginnings. Nature abhors a vacuum; She is forever busy breaking down and building back up. We may not care for Her methods. We may resent them deeply for the Deep Work required of us.
wrote recently that she was “born into a time of endings.” We all are. Life is ending all the time around us, from those fast-living tiny species whose existence we never acknowledge to the slow passage of ancient trees or coral reefs whose death is somewhere in the future, hurried by climate change, but inevitable just the same.But we get to change our minds. We get to grow. We get to give up old ideas and false definitions which imprison us. We get all those gifts.
We are also “born into a time of beginnings.”
The trees near Joan will return, as she writes. Nature destroys just as She renews, albeit most of us past sixty or so won’t be around to see the fullness of that promise.
For a terrific crash course on endings and beginnings I highly recommend Netflix’s Life on Our Planet. Entire dynasties of life, of which barely a fraction has survived to be with us in all its complexities today, is compressed into a series which demonstrates how, on a much larger scale, things must end for something else to begin.
At best we’re well served to enjoy the ride. It will be brief; might as well make it magnificent as best we can.
For right now, I get to go lie down for quick nap with my new puppy. New beginnings.
Let’s play.
Thanks as always for joining me today. I hope spring or fall, as it were, wherever you are, is full of lovely endings and beginnings as is all of life. May we all have the wisdom to appreciate what each brings. If this was valuable to you please consider
If you know someone struggling with endings and who can use the perspective, please also consider
Above all, seek and find joy.
Who doesn't struggle (at least a bit) with change?
It's so much fun to be disgruntled when something you're used to, something you're comfortable with, has to up and vanish or not be like we expect. I'm intending to be gruntled instead though. Working on it.
On puppies and dogs. I've never had one of my very own. And I really want the companionship and unconditional love from a furry friend. But. The responsibility is overwhelming trying for my first at 66. I don't have kids, and came from a small family, so when a breeder or trainer says "it's like having a kid..." I cringe. And take a pass. So for now I'll dog sit, bake treats, and give my full attention to any furry friend at my feet, or the one jumping on me, knocking me down to the ground, or the the one who threw up all over my bed and had to be rushed to the emergency vet, all of them get as much love, care, and attention as I can give... and I am their voice when there isn't 'that person' who will speak for them. Great article!