AHSS The Gift of Years: Sadness (Lesson 22)

“Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read,” said Francis Bacon. There is something about getting older that tempts us to settle down a bit. We begin to run the ruts in the road, not because we cannot find our way to other paths, other places, other people but because we really don’t want to make the effort it takes to do it. New people, ideas, patterns not only take effort, but also demand new attention. The thought of familiar, on the other hand, comforts us. It assures us that life, as we have known it, is still there, stable, secure. Settling into a routine of friends, foods, places and plans is easier and fulfilling. These things are our identity as well as our pleasure. They say who we are and who we have always been, where we belong and why.

There is a cost to settling into the routine of being what we have always been. The cost of familiarity is the angst of loss, the anxiety that comes with feeling more and more alone. As one thing after another goes, an awareness that we are becoming a world unto ourselves grows. A natural melancholy sets in as the years pass by. Little by little, the world that shaped us fades away. But then one day, in a rush, all the beauties of those years come roaring through us in an emotional whirlwind. The problem is that nobody cares about them now but us. Those years have taken with them a part of ourselves. Is it to be mourned - or celebrated - for its disappearance?

The remembrance of the days we learned to kneel for our nightly prayers and stand up straight to sing our hymns has nothing of absolute value to maintain the present. But what is worth wondering about is whether we still have any of that piety in us. The pain that comes with the remembrance of piety lost is a good kind of pain. It means that there is something in us that still holds on to the innocence of childhood. Only after the rules have been broken – after we stop worrying about whether the passions of youth endanger salvation- are the lessons really learned. If we forget the presence of God in our lives we find ourselves terribly alone. No doubt about it, there are moments from the past which, when they flash back, carry the sting of new awareness.

Ageing well is the real goal of life. To allow ourselves to age without vitality, energy, purpose, and growth is simply to get old rather than to age well as we go. Aging is the process by which we face the tasks of every level of life. Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery. Those tasks accomplished bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world.

Remember the great heroes, noble ideas, and the fine deeds that we ourselves inherited from the past. They focused our hearts on higher goals when we were young. They filled us with the notions of the grandeur of the soul. What happened to those? What happened to us? Were we up to the level of any of them at all? There is unfinished business aplenty to do, too many things left unsaid, too much teaching yet to be done if we are ever to do our part in making our world as good as those heroes of earlier generations made theirs.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is the desire to give in to the natural sadness that comes with the shifting journey through life, to cling to it in ways that make living in the present a dour and depressing prospect. A blessing of these years is the realization that there is still so much for us to do that we have no time, no right to be sad.