Anyone who has been paying attention (and I have to say there's no reason at all why you should have been) knows that I'm not much of a planner. No, I don't have a map for the next ten years of my life, I've always had to say. Questions like these have always stopped me in my tracks.
Quite frankly, I can't even imagine what I might be doing ten years from now.
So tell me (pace Cole Porter) why should it be true . . . that I'm immersed in figuring out my next and future moves.
Well, there's something about eighty that turns you right around, making a mockery of the principles on which you rested. Okay, now I am looking five (maybe ten) years down the line. Wanna make something out of it?
How does that line go? Something about "there's nothing like blah-blah to focus one's mind." The original quote is much more to the point. But you get the gist; I'm looking through the narrowing tunnel. Please don't tell me "Why, my dear, you could live to be 100; you've still got twenty years to play with." I don't need threats. Living to 100 is not something devoutly to be wished. I'm kind of enjoying the new 80-year-old's notion that my years are numbered. Maybe even my days . . .
A friend asked last year what was the theme of my life. Oh, brother! To me, that's the same as asking where I see myself in ten years, though it's in reverse. I couldn't answer her. But now I can. I can because as I was gently meandering through the future I realized that I have only X number of years left in which to learn. To learn. That's the theme of my life that I hadn't even recognized.
But it isn't about book-learning or learning a new language (or re-learning French) or learning to play a Chopin etude. It's about learning how my body—the matter of me—feels in this space of being alive.
It's about paying attention to the physical nature of me—since this is who I am and where I am at this time—and since I am about the latest bloomer you can find in this arena. Kind of a Christmas cactus, blooming (but beautifully, if it's well cared for) with glorious bright red blossoms for a couple of weeks at the end of the year.
Well, that was a metaphor better touched on than explored in depth. I'll just say that I have a lifetime of Not Knowing Me to make up for, and I am approaching the task in a spirit of excitement instead of guilt and recrimination.
Let's say others are way ahead of me in this respect. I say, who cares? I'm grateful to still be here to learn this important lesson, even if it's the last thing I do!
And that brings me to the second leg of my plan. Not only will I devote my time to feeling myself in this world, but I am also making the point to do so by doing things that give me pleasure. Someone has floated the idea of twice-a-day recess periods for adults. That sounds like just what I want—with the proviso that I get to set the parameters of what constitutes recess (mine won't be playing outside in winter!). The table is already laid upstairs with craft projects. The knitting needles are arrayed around a hook (they're all circular needles, so they bend).
I'm at a two-tined fork in the road: a tine of knowing who I am physically ("Be. Here. Now.", I'd say, if it hadn't already been said) and a tine of filling this new-found self with the energy that proceeds from joy.
I'd better write all this down (oh, I just did) or I'll forget it and revert to type. To my OLD type, that is. Though it is clear to me now that one's "type" is not set in stone. Change is what happens as we live our lives. The types they are a-changin'.
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