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 Mason's
Meditations
If
you're looking for something to chew over, some thoughtful seeds
for mental cultivation, bookmark this page for Jeff Mason's monthly
meditations. To think in or take away...
Number
Forty One: The View from Middle Age
It
is common to think that there are stages on life’s way. Thinkers
have different ideas about what and how many these stages are, but
they all agree that there are stages and that, if we live long enough,
we go through all of them. A life that is cut off in middle age
is not completed by that death but simply terminated. This is why
we feel worse when the young die than when the old do. We expect
people to start dying after 70, but before that we are likely to
think that something has been wasted. Aristotle speaks of happiness
as that which belongs to a long and fulfilled life. We cannot speak
of the young as happy in the full sense, for we do not know what
misfortunes await them.
In
youth there is a great abundance of vitality and sheer animal spirits.
Hormones are running strongly, and the world is an exciting and
scary place to be. The future looks endless, though one is told
that death awaits us all. Yet mortality is not very real to the
young, even when they lose loved ones along the way. There is too
much to do, plans to be made, an education to achieve, a living
to earn, and planning for retirement. Life that was so open begins
to close with the choices and commitments we make. On top of this,
life happens to us. We get hurt, injured, worn down by time and
repetition. Slowly, ever so slowly it seems at first, our energy
decreases, the blood does not run as hotly. We enter middle age.
This
is not to say that we should all plan to die before we turn thirty.
With any luck, one does not plunge into decrepitude on becoming
a certain age. The vitality is still there, but now it is coupled
with experience and a sense of the patterns of time and the world.
One is no longer so naive, so trusting, so ignorant of cause and
effect as one once was. This is the trade off, what Plato calls
"the turning of the soul," where instead of looking forward
toward a limitless future, we point backward to a past that now
has a meaning it could never have had at the time. If one is ever
to get one’s life together with a clear eye and a sense of
humor, it is now, in middle age, when the perspective from the middle
puts the extremes of birth and death in old age together in a single
view.
By
middle age, the seeds planted when young have come to fruition,
for good or ill. We do come to a harvest in the normal course of
events. For the most part, once you get to 50 or so, what will be,
will have been. Yes, there are still goals to achieve, perhaps,
a future for which to prepare, a will to write, and so on, but the
end is in sight now, and the time left within which to act effectively
is strictly limited, despite not generally knowing the exact timing
of our death, except in suicide or execution. It is time, therefore,
in middle age to make every day count. Enjoy what you have accomplished
if you can, and do not be too frustrated that not all you dreams
and plans have come true, for that disappointment, like death itself,
is common to us all.
.
Mason's
Meditations will next be updated mid-April 2004
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