Not nice
My first-born turns eighteen in less than four months. He’s booked the licence test for 11.00am on his birthday. The beginning of a new era. A great-big-wonderful-start-of-your-adult-life world’s-at-your-feet-ground-breaking-breath-takingly SCARY era.
And he’ll want to borrow my car.
Lately, I’ve been feeling … vulnerable … is that the word? Or is it fragile? This year my birthday will nudge me closer to the next decade than the one before it. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve been looking ahead, planning out the next few years, imagining the possibilities, bravely accepting the sobering truth that I will never realise many of the dreams I held close to my heart when I was eighteen.
I’ve been looking back, noticing the things I’ve let go. Some by choice, some by necessity, and some with great reluctance and an accompanying sense of grief. Some things have simply fallen away without me even noticing. As Joyce Rupp says in her book Dear Heart Come Home: the path of midlife spirituality, they are like little deaths.
It suddenly occurred to me the other day that my hair doesn’t shine anymore. The one redeeming feature of having fine hair over the years has been its sheen. People would comment on it. On one occasion, a butcher cast aside my sausages and chops and leaned over the counter to feel my hair. She couldn’t believe it was natural.
Then there’s the reaching for a word and not being able to find it – the infuriating brain fog. The feeling like an idiot when you can’t remember the name of something ordinary, like catalogue or sedentary. It’s quite a confidence shaker.
Or when you no longer feel confident on a pair of roller-blades or skis. Not that you can’t roller-blade or ski, because you would dearly love to! – you know that if you fall, you could break something that would take a hell of a long time to repair. Actually, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. I think I’d still be roller-blading and skiing if it hadn’t been for the back surgery six years ago.
Other things I’ve been happy to let go of. Like the need to be nice. I’m with Helen Garner on that – well most of the time. (“On Turning Fifty” (pp 158–162) in True Stories.) A friend once said to me that now that she had turned fifty, she didn’t want to waste a minute of her life. When you lose a friend or parent to cancer, you become intensely aware of your own mortality. So when the friend tore into a shop assistant for ignoring her request for service while the girl finished off a trivial conversation with her colleague, instead of being horrified, I understood. And that experience has given me confidence on many an occasion, since, to stand up for myself. Helen Garner is right: a surprising, new confidence emerges at age fifty.
Michael Leunig’s Curly World was a good read on Saturday. He talks about the descent into old age and winter. He looks at himself in the mirror: “Winter arrives and the face looks suddenly more blotchy. Summer's healthy glow has gone from the brow and a mean pallor is asserting itself like sickly moonlight from the darkness within. Under the strain of countless bygone disappointments the flesh has drooped into irregular, irredeemable saggings that now wither into an insipid glare from the mirror. It is you. It is winter.”
It’s not all downhill, however, and as Leunig points out, “There is a promise about old age, something to do with the soul that still needs to flourish.” He speaks about the gaining of X-ray vision as one reaches late middle age. It’s the ability to see through well-defended things like corporate systems, celebrities, and the like. Perhaps it’s the bull-shit detector that Robert Dessaix talks about. Leunig articulates it brilliantly, “Yet that which is valuable and true remains, and without the obfuscating detritus of cultural claptrap, authenticity shines more clearly than ever.”
And as Leunig says, it begins by seeing through yourself.
Heading into “late” middle age brings with it some paradoxes. There is the wisdom of the years that informs your choices, decisions and judgements, but at the same time, subversively, curiously, accompanying that getting of wisdom is a process of unknowing. The things you were so sure about, the answers to life’s curly questions that you worked so hard to figure out, are not rock-solid anymore. The more there is to understand, the more you realise you can never understand. And do you need to?
There is a peace about not knowing. A lifting of a weight. A relief to be done with the responsibility of finding answers to questions.
So off I go into the future, with a bit less baggage and my dull hair.
Trying to decide whether I’ll let him borrow the car.
And he’ll want to borrow my car.
Lately, I’ve been feeling … vulnerable … is that the word? Or is it fragile? This year my birthday will nudge me closer to the next decade than the one before it. That’s all I’m saying. I’ve been looking ahead, planning out the next few years, imagining the possibilities, bravely accepting the sobering truth that I will never realise many of the dreams I held close to my heart when I was eighteen.
I’ve been looking back, noticing the things I’ve let go. Some by choice, some by necessity, and some with great reluctance and an accompanying sense of grief. Some things have simply fallen away without me even noticing. As Joyce Rupp says in her book Dear Heart Come Home: the path of midlife spirituality, they are like little deaths.
It suddenly occurred to me the other day that my hair doesn’t shine anymore. The one redeeming feature of having fine hair over the years has been its sheen. People would comment on it. On one occasion, a butcher cast aside my sausages and chops and leaned over the counter to feel my hair. She couldn’t believe it was natural.
Then there’s the reaching for a word and not being able to find it – the infuriating brain fog. The feeling like an idiot when you can’t remember the name of something ordinary, like catalogue or sedentary. It’s quite a confidence shaker.
Or when you no longer feel confident on a pair of roller-blades or skis. Not that you can’t roller-blade or ski, because you would dearly love to! – you know that if you fall, you could break something that would take a hell of a long time to repair. Actually, I think this is a bit of an exaggeration. I think I’d still be roller-blading and skiing if it hadn’t been for the back surgery six years ago.
Other things I’ve been happy to let go of. Like the need to be nice. I’m with Helen Garner on that – well most of the time. (“On Turning Fifty” (pp 158–162) in True Stories.) A friend once said to me that now that she had turned fifty, she didn’t want to waste a minute of her life. When you lose a friend or parent to cancer, you become intensely aware of your own mortality. So when the friend tore into a shop assistant for ignoring her request for service while the girl finished off a trivial conversation with her colleague, instead of being horrified, I understood. And that experience has given me confidence on many an occasion, since, to stand up for myself. Helen Garner is right: a surprising, new confidence emerges at age fifty.
Michael Leunig’s Curly World was a good read on Saturday. He talks about the descent into old age and winter. He looks at himself in the mirror: “Winter arrives and the face looks suddenly more blotchy. Summer's healthy glow has gone from the brow and a mean pallor is asserting itself like sickly moonlight from the darkness within. Under the strain of countless bygone disappointments the flesh has drooped into irregular, irredeemable saggings that now wither into an insipid glare from the mirror. It is you. It is winter.”
It’s not all downhill, however, and as Leunig points out, “There is a promise about old age, something to do with the soul that still needs to flourish.” He speaks about the gaining of X-ray vision as one reaches late middle age. It’s the ability to see through well-defended things like corporate systems, celebrities, and the like. Perhaps it’s the bull-shit detector that Robert Dessaix talks about. Leunig articulates it brilliantly, “Yet that which is valuable and true remains, and without the obfuscating detritus of cultural claptrap, authenticity shines more clearly than ever.”
And as Leunig says, it begins by seeing through yourself.
Heading into “late” middle age brings with it some paradoxes. There is the wisdom of the years that informs your choices, decisions and judgements, but at the same time, subversively, curiously, accompanying that getting of wisdom is a process of unknowing. The things you were so sure about, the answers to life’s curly questions that you worked so hard to figure out, are not rock-solid anymore. The more there is to understand, the more you realise you can never understand. And do you need to?
There is a peace about not knowing. A lifting of a weight. A relief to be done with the responsibility of finding answers to questions.
So off I go into the future, with a bit less baggage and my dull hair.
Trying to decide whether I’ll let him borrow the car.
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