Most of the people I know, most of the people I meet, are asking the same questions. How much money do I have? How much health insurance? How much savings for the future, how much money in my death and dying accounts? In my reserve fund for emergencies? When will the economy recover, the real estate market revive? I have often asked myself the same questions – our national struggles seem to be over paying bills. I am glad Henry David Thoreau didn’t ask these questions, he would never have gone near Walden Pond.
As Joseph Campbell foresaw, America is turning from a mythically drive country – the pursuit of freedom and happiness and opportunity – to a security conscious one – how much money do I have? What label can I put on myself, on others? How much money will I have? How can I have enough money to challenge fate and live forever?
Everyone has the right to ask their own questions, and I have retired from judging the choices of other people, and also retired from letting other people judge mine. My life is, in fact, not an argument for others. Nor do I choose to see our common life as an argument, a choice between two suffocatingly narrow ways of thinking.
Some time I ago, I began asking myself this question: Where Am I Now? Where am I in my life? I have been asking it for decades.
Am I happy? Productive? Doing what I love? Permitting love to enter my life? Am I being honest? Authentic? Facing up to myself and my life? Getting the help I need? Facing the truths I need to face? Doing the hard work of self-determination, self-awareness. Do I have a spiritual life? Am I open to new experience, or as I age, am I closing up to it, wallowing in nostalgia, regret and resignation. Can I change, or will I fear and resist change? There are things that I need to accept, things that I will never accept.
Where am I now? My idea of security is this. There is nothing for me that is more important than a meaningful life. There is no risk too great to take in pursuit of one. There is, for me, no worse life than one in bondage or slavery, and there is nothing in any way secure about such a life. I happily choose a shorter life than one purchased in thrall to other people’s profit.
Where am I now? I am embracing creative change, evolving, working to remain relevant in a different world. For me, aging is n not about downsizing my life and expectations, it is having the freedom and some wisdom to open my life up.
Where am I now? I am on the road, on the path. I know there is no end to it, no final destination. I work at it every day. Someone wrote the other day that she gets that I had problems in my childhood, and she is tired of hearing about it. Sounds like whining to her, she said. I thought of my father coming into my room when I wet my bed: get over it, he said, move on. You’re just being a sissy. There are always people out there to diminish and trivialize, the Greek chorus of cynicism. I know, I have often been one of them. A reminder to move forward, to keep going. My father did not have it right.
As much as anything, I have learned to acknowledge my fear, but never surrender to it. A few years ago – a few months ago – I could not have said that. Where am I know? Better than before, in every way. And planning to be better still.
Someone I used to know quite well wrote recently that it takes a million dollars to be secure in one’s old age in America. I can’t imagine a more dangerous way to live than that.