Winter full moons. Their blue light and the way they look cast on snow. Not reflecting, but drawing out what can't normally be seen. A stark beauty only possible because it happens in harshness. Is this why we have seasons?
Living to 100
I've been reading the diary of Calvin Tomkins, a former writer for The New Yorker, and his comments regarding how he is spending his 100th year - what he's thinking and how he feels. The changes happening to him and how he assimilates them into what he's known as his life until then. It comes down to this: most of our lives (or mine, anyway) assume a level of health and lucidity. We are supple and flexible and energetic and strong. We get sick sometimes, sure, but then we get well again, as well as we were before the illness. We get used to being this way. It is our normal.
Our Timeline of Progressive Maturation
Put in terms of a projected timeline, we reach physical maturity in the first season of our life, and that is our main concern. We, well, we grow up. Then, however, if we're paying attention, spiritual and psychological maturity start to catch up. We've reached the best our physical body will ever be and we start to build other kinds of muscles. This is middle age. Then our body begins to decline. Slowly at first, but somewhere in the 70s the disassembly begins to accelerate. By 99, Mr. Tomkins has a long list of physical facilities that don't work anymore. Ones that just seemed to sneak up him almost overnight, one after another.
We grow up, you see, mostly without much effort. It just happens. One's cells know what to do automatically. We become our most beautiful and vital selves so easily that we can sometimes stop other people in their tracks. We hum with electric pleasure. We are immortal and it feels so good, like the natural order of things. And it is. For awhile.
We aren't immortal, though, and sooner or later, our body begins to remind us. We learn the rest of the natural order and this, too, like our strength, is a kind of gift because while we are exulting in our vitality, our spirit is awakening and growing. What our body has long known, our spirit can also now know. We have been men and women who strode with gods in the flesh. Now we can learn to stride with God in the spirit.
This is the final and complete maturation.
What if Feels Like to Live It
This last spiritual growth signals its arrival, like the first one, through the flesh. What was a strong, beautiful body sags and greys and begins to grow slack no matter how much we try to build it up. Skin and bones thin. Organs stutter and fail. When we sicken or fracture, we may heal, but not to prior levels of vitality. We have to get used to lower physical plateaus, new normals, reduced horizons. And it is from this place that the fruit of the spirit stands out in greater clarity. The spirit we grow during our waning days of physical strength becomes our final, sustaining strength, bearing us up not to greater physical feats but to different heights. The God who first showed himself during the noise of our vigor becomes our entire beautiful world. The voice that was still and small grows to a symphony in crescendo.
I do not achieve much in the flesh anymore, so what I do achieve originates not from the flesh but from the spirit. I have a broken arm now and it is healing, but it will probably not heal to a level as supple and nimble as it once was. This new level will dictate my next reduced physical plateau and as such, is a gift not only to gently prepare me for my end, but to give me a chance to marvel at the grace that brought me here.
What I Had, What I Have
I will never again be completely healthy.
I will never again know spiritual poverty.
The moon is full tonight while I find I am in my life's winter. It is beautiful because what is real in me lives still unlimited, unfettered. I can still sing.
Photo: Forbes, Sports Health
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