My book group has chosen that we each read a book on aging for the next meeting. A list came out and I remember reading Joan Chittister’s book The Gift of Years: Growing Old Gracefully.
I return to it now, many years later, when it has greater immediacy.
She quotes Meridel Le Sueur, “I am luminous with age.” Miridel Le Sueur lived to be ninety-six. I’m with how illuminating living with those words can be. I went to sleep with “I am luminous with age”, and woke this morning reverberating like a bell as the words rang through.
In the book, Chittister writes of how aging in this society is not currently respected, and yet, here we are, many of us with decades of knowledge, learning, testing, receiving, learning to have compassion for ourselves as we muddle through and learn to trust the guidance within as we reach out for meaningful conversations with family and friends. We flail and fail and rise again.
Chittister says aging is about transformation, transformation not so much in the way we look to other people, but in the way we look at life. “Age is the moment we come to terms with ourselves. We begin to look inside ourselves. We begin to find more strength in the spirit than in the flesh.”
A friend spoke of hearing her neighbor in her room at a skilled nursing facility crying in the night. I think of tears, the cleansing of tears. Each of us contains this mixture of love and fear, laughter and tears, this movement and vibration constantly showing us and giving us life as we are here. We are luminous with each moment, each day, when we allow ourselves to feel and be alive.
Howard Thurman:
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.
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