We are put on earth a space to learn to bear the beams of love
~William Blake
With this post, I am announcing my year-long project to record my thoughts on my 70th year, beginning on my 69th birthday. I finished 69 years yesterday, and I start my 70th October 18th, 2017. This is also the last year of my 7th decade.
Why do I want to do this recording of my thoughts on aging?
I am not sure, but I do have some thoughts. Lots of us, 10,000 a day in the US, turn 70 every day now. So, I want to talk to my guy and gal buddies about what I am going through and maybe it will prompt more dialogue about how we are seeing things. I want to pay close attention to my life too, to see what I am experiencing and learning. It is too easy not to pay attention, to watch another game I do not need, or to go through the day in the usual flow of thoughts, bouncing from periods of focus to those dominated by inner chatter.
This writing project won’t make me rich, famous, or prolong my life. But that does not mean making a record of my thoughts won’t be fun, and maybe a few readers will find some insight here that might be helpful to them too. I might stumble onto a profound thought now and again. That would be nice.
One more thing. I hope writing will make me more aware of how to make decisions as I end this 7th and enter my 8th decade. There is a lot to decide. Where do I put my time? What do Patricia, my wife and I, really want to do as we let go of work little by slow, feeling the gift of time increase on a monthly basis, while it decreases overall as we head towards life’s end? Where do we want to live, what people do we want to see, what learning do we do? What causes or service do we support with our energy? What about our spiritual lives, our friends and our dear family, spread around the country? Do we want any or a lot more of global travel?
The list of questions and decisions goes on.
Maybe better decisions and staying intentional, alert and open all at the same time, are reasons why I plan to do 52 posts. I will ask myself again when it is over.
The Plan
The simple plan is to do one post a week, and maybe collect them into an e-book at the end of the year, if it seems worthwhile then. We will see about that.
I have been at my two blogs a while now: my personal one that this is attached to (evocateurblog.com) and my blog for Psychology Today (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-your-past). But this is different. I have never committed to one topic, nor to one blog a week for a year. So this is a new endeavor.
I have been reading a ton about aging. (Here is my book list on the “conscious aging” section of my website—http://www.johnpschuster.com/conscious-aging/ ). So I know what a lot of other people know and think about aging. I also know some of what I think. But I hope to use this year to ponder what I know, and don’t know, and ask the questions of me and all of us about moving into these later years, its gifts and challenges.
My thought at this point still early in the journey is that the gifts can far outweigh the challenges, which are many and can be formidable. I will not romanticize aging and sugarcoat it, but I do look for the positives and gains that I sense are there and that I am already harvesting. Harvesting takes some work however.
So let me leave installment #1 of this blog on that note of gifts. Mary Sarton said this in a New York Times op-ed piece in 1978 (and I repeat this from only a few blogs ago because it is such a great image): If the whole of life is a journey toward old age, then I believe it is also a journey toward love. And love may be as intense in old age as it was in youth, only it is different, set in a wider arc, and the more precious because the time we have to enjoy it is bound to be brief.
I am in that wider arc of love now. I can feel it better at 69 than 59… can you too?