Aging My Way
I’m at a crossroads. I’m worried about the world, especially attempts to silence a free press while anyone can deliberately speak untruths on the internet. It’s already a mine field trying to figure out what’s the truth and what’s not. People shouldn’t believe everything they hear or read.
Let me repeat that: People shouldn’t believe everything they hear or read. In these days, double and triple checking everything is a must. Even so, what I’m seeing and hearing for the days ahead has my head in a tailspin. I just want to stick my head in the sand and let the world pass me by.
I mean I’m 85 and retired. I could just bury myself in books, art, birding, friends who don’t talk politics and other things that give me pleasure. Why not? I often feel useless because I have no power to make the world a kinder place.
And then, while I’m reading, I come across Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem Ulysses in which he wrote about growing old: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/ To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” And I realize I’m still not ready to turn the world off.
Suddenly my rabbit hole emerges to a time when I discovered Lord Byron’s poem, The Prisoner of Chillon. I wouldn’t know for another 15 years that I was destined to be a writer, but the ancient sounding words, or so they seemed to a 10-year-old, enchanted me. I memorized that lengthy poem, simply because I loved the sound of its words. Many of those words, I still remember 75 years later: My very chains and I grew friends,/ So much a long communion tends/ To make us what we are:—even I/ Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.
I love the freedom of being retired and yet I miss being chained to the feeling of being useful.
By now, well down that rabbit hole, I contemplate these two poems by authors that younger generations have most likely never heard of, and I’m back at that crossroads – and Robert Frost’s words about that road not taken.
Finally, I laugh at myself. Who says that road can’t be taken on another day? And who says I can’t still keep one foot in the world around me and try myself to be kinder, and the other foot in books and birds and art and pleasant friends.
Perhaps there is no crossroads at all – just plodding on.
Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.
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