Notes in The Margin

Notes in The Margin Capter 2

CHAPTER 2

From: annewithane@mail.com

To respond to your questions:

At odds with aging. More to the point, attempting to understand the mythology of age as we cling to it in our culture. I have never felt so fully alive, so vital and energized as I do right now. That flies in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least that convention that has been drummed into my psyche over all these years. I am more alive now than I was in those days of invincible youth. Everything lies before me as the greatest of new adventures, the possibilities are endless and open ended. Constraints are non existent. It is without a doubt the most amazing time of my life.

On the other hand it gets confusing because of all the programming of a lifetime that says I should be wrapping things up, knitting sweaters on the porch in my rocking chair, expecting to physically decline, move into some form of senility, stop learning and growing, prepare for the eventual death, worry over my health and obsess over each little ache and pain knowing it foretells my decline into blithering idiocy with drooling from one end and incontinence at the other. You know how irritating that inner dialog can be.

You can see these two views are not compatible. Age, regardless of numbers is now and always has been a state of mind. It is a belief. Something structured and rigidly adhered to for most people. I've never actually bought into that part of this culture. . .that days on the calendar marking the span of a life have any real relevance to the person. I didn't accept it when I was young, I won't accept it now.

Everyone I have ever discussed that nebulous thing we call age with, regardless of what age the person might be in calendar days, seems to have the same concept within. Somewhere between 20 and 30 is by far the most common feeling of an inner age. . . is always the answer. My own mother at 95 said inside she still felt 25. We just do.

I often wonder what would happen to the physical body if we actually stopped believing that it would age and fall apart? I feel very strongly that it is the beliefs we hold onto that direct the course of things much more than biology. We have an amazing ability to affect and even control our biology.

Why do we want to stay young? I think it is a many layered question, but for the most part it is difficult to reconcile the changes we see in our physical selves with that inner 25 year old.

For me aging is not about dying. I know some hold onto enormous fears about death. I am not one of them. My favorite analogy is it is merely opening a door to another room and walking through it. On to exploring other options and as yet undreamed dreams. A new adventure.

I have lived alone for the last ten years, without a partner or a roommate, no family within a thousand miles. In so many ways it has been the most wonderful ten years of my life. Of course I have had my difficulties, challenges are always there for all of us, but all in all it has been a fabulous run. The freedom of it is incredible. Perhaps my life would have been even more interesting and fulfilling if I had taken some span of years earlier on to be single and totally comfortable with knowing myself. Alas, I have spent the greater portion of my life in one partner relationship or another. And when I wasn't in a relationship I was spending a good deal of my time out there looking for one. All of that looking for validation outside of myself. I think that's what it is about partnering, a validation that we are worthy of love, worthy of someone's interest, someone's time and energy and caring. It is really all about us and our insecurities and inadequacies as much as or more than the other, the partner. If you think about it, people rarely talk about searching for someone to love as much as they are talking about finding someone to love them.

There is a wisdom and a secret here. The someone that we need to love us is ourself. We need to learn to love ourselves in all the truthfulness of who we are. A big, arms wide open, acceptance of all of the parts of us no matter whether we view them as the wonderful things or the really not so terrific things. For the most part, we don't take the time to find out who it is we are so we can love ourselves. We don't come to understand that none of this is so much even about who we are as about who we are becoming. We are not stagnant. This is an evolving creation.