While I drive through thick darkness, relief, discouragement, and frustration collide. A brief sense of hope, like a sliver of new moon on a cloud drifted night, accompanies an odd jumble of feelings reminiscent of a six-month old child with unfathomable new capacities, lashing out without the faintest idea why. Something big is happening. My bones know. A familiar voice mutters, “You’re giving up.” Something wiser is not listening.
Driving into that November night, I had intended to find a meeting supporting a campaign to amend the U.S. constitution. A group was seeking to inspire the Massachusetts legislature to ratify a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations could no longer claim the legal rights of living, breathing people. News of the day on public radio accompanied the drive. The passing landscape, bathed at first in soft pink and orange, gradually melted into a particularly deep blackness devoid of stars. Eventually a road sign flashed through the headlights announcing the intended exit several miles ahead. There would be time to grope my way to the unfamiliar meeting place I told myself. As the distance from home increased on that bleak, shrouded highway without services or street lights, I turned up the radio.
Another sign flashed by for exits beyond the one I wanted with no mention of mine. I had passed it! Cursing, I drove even further to make a U-turn at an overpass. Turning back, nervous energy mounted and enthusiasm cratered, overshadowed by despair about all the gasoline and personal energy this little adventure was costing. Turning off the radio increased concentration only to highlight how late and lost I felt, and scared. It was appalling to think that despite paying close attention while listening to the news, never a challenge before, the large green sign for my intended exit had never even registered!
Somehow, without acknowledgement, age had stealthily increased the rate at which this body tires, accompanying an unwelcome introduction to macular degeneration, making it harder to see in the dark, two situations I couldn’t condone. Acute attention to the news must have been a subconscious way to push aside anxiety about the oppressive darkness and my surprising lack of stamina. My ego cried, “But how can that be?! I’m still young, only sixty-two!”
My chattering brain immediately responded, “If you weren’t so stubborn about new technology, you could have used GPS like most sane people and wouldn’t be lost OR late!” Fast on the heels of that quickly rejected message was more unwanted wisdom. After all the effort to find the meeting, it was more than likely that if and when I had finally arrived, I would have found a group gathering in yet another setting like those from which I was taking a break. A sinking feeling reminded me that the group would be developing action steps, identifying volunteers, and creating what would certainly be yet another interminably depressing David and Goliath fight for which my energy had gone to ground. It was a timely, important fight, certainly. Perhaps, though, the combined effect of distance, darkness, and anxiety were not just irritations to push through, but messages from life itself that it was not my job to run this particular race.
Mentally kicking myself for beginning the trip, the intuitive voice that had quietly surfaced as I’d hit the road rose in memory. It had whispered the truth as I pushed arms into jacket sleeves and headed out the door, clearly saying that I was making a mistake. Driving on, I realized why I’d ignored it. First, the creative writing project I’d joyfully begun in the first weeks of freedom had begun to seem overwhelmingly large and more like work than play. Second, an old, carping voice was running on an endless feedback loop; “Something must be done. Someone must do it, and maybe you’re one of the few willing to act.” It sounded like the repeating last cut of a record someone forgot at the end of a party, years ago when we still listened to music on vinyl.
Nearing home after the long, fruitless drive, more unwanted wisdom surfaced. The same intuitive voice began to speak beneath discouraged, impatient confusion, saying there were other, deeper aspects of life yet to be discovered. That message accompanied a sense of being inexorably drawn into a vortex of new experiences, whether I wanted to go there or not and I really didn’t.
Consciousness rose from sleep the next morning into the need to let go of an ego identity that had given life meaning throughout the rewarding career which felt like a wonderful adventure when it began. Awareness dawned that relinquishing any ego identity, even unknowingly, and even for a short time, reveals it as the smoke and mirrors it’s always been, even as it vehemently defends itself, very disconcerting let me tell you. When relinquished for any amount of time, a gaping psychological hole opens in its wake. As illusory as they are, ego identities have lives of their own, physically manifesting in brain synapses built by habitual repetition of thought and action patterns functioning together as decision-making platforms in the chaos of choice that is adult life without them. When they’ve successfully fed and housed you for years, letting go feels like trying to shed your own skin.
Managing that shedding process requires a full embrace of everything contained in life’s final stage. Deceptive advertisements featuring beautiful, smiling, “active” elders, luring people into institutional “retirement communities,” don’t help. If you’ve ever known anyone living in one, you know how quickly those ads reveal themselves as ushers away from society into death’s waystations, places to quietly wait without disturbing other generations except during occasional visits to those gilded cages.
Beginning to sense the magnitude of the choice I’d made the previous evening, I threw off the bedcovers. Clearly this short-term remedy for work burnout opened a door to much more than could be resolved in a few months of freedom. Suddenly, I understood the anxiety that flooded in when my daughter announced her wedding plans. It had been much more than well-founded fear for her happiness, although it was that. My daughter’s move onto the life stage of family creation had also highlighted my own exit from that same stage, along with the command performance I would need to begin on the one beyond it. By helping her plan the wedding I’d engaged a culturally unheralded life shift of my own, forcing a giant leap toward the cliff edge where I later found myself driving fruitlessly around in the dark.
I hadn’t imagined such a cliff existed, much less how to safely dive over the edge. Until the wedding plans, I was fully centered in dancing life steps I’d worked hard to invent, creating a contented pattern meant to continue until death. What, after all, came after that dance? Whatever our beliefs, there’s no avoiding the mind-blowing fact that slowing down means beginning to move toward the end of physical existence, not something easy to swallow.
As I dressed, recognition also dawned that the challenging opportunity to follow last night’s glimmer of cloud drifted moon would not only require work, but oddly also courage to face the reason the stories inside me were pushing to be written. Mid-life was smack in the middle of the rearview mirror and time was moving on. A dream of creative writing pleaded for attention, warning that I’d better grab it now while energy remained. Apparently the writing process held another mystery with a life of its own. Marshalling courage to face that conundrum, weird as it seemed, was essential to committing to daily writing practice as both playful experimentation and disciplined craft, which apparently held a key to something else. Whether or not the writing ever got published, fully committing to its practice also seemed the only way to sustain some form of contentment.
A year later, I took that dive into the deep ravine of full retirement. The experience was nothing like resting in a deck chair on the beach. Several phrases from old rock songs blended together in echoing memory as I took the plunge. Something was happening, causing me to push off the cliff edge of secure living patterns, although exactly what was entirely unclear. I needed to dive into unknown psychological realms in order to find out. Somehow, writing for its own sake became the best tool I have in the journey to uncover what that something is. Thankfully, instead of crashing on the rocks of grief after plunging, wings of serendipity buoyed me up as I fell. Now, the more I trust those wings, the more lift comes with each updraft. When the wind blows me into the depths again, to move through old shadows, the company of trees, birds, and earth attend that gliding journey, subtly shifting grief and fear into gratitude, like the muscular twitch of an Eagle’s flight feathers sending it soaring again, always moving, always changing, always learning to be free.