Or The Drama of Aging

Nancy was looking for shoes. I was looking for someone to sketch. So while Nancy wandered through the shops, I parked myself in the middle of the mall and waited. I didn’t see her when she first arrived as I was trying to capture the image of a young man typing on his computer to my right. When I finished sketching him, I sat back, looked to the left, and there she was tucked inconspicuously in the corner. She was wearing an orange ski jacket, yellow scarf, and bright blue head phones. Her eyes were riveted to the lime green I Pad that she was pecking away on. The table in front of her held a computer that she typed on every few minutes before returning to her I Pad pecking. About every five minutes she reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her cell phone to check for messages. She was Chinese and looked to be high school age. During the fifteen minutes that it took me to sketch her, she never once look up or around the room. She was completely ensconced in her own electronic world.

As I watched her sitting alone and invisible to the Friday night shoppers who scurried around her, something stirred inside of me. I remembered being an insecure adolescent transitioning to becoming a teenager. I too felt alone. I longed to be connected to friends who thought that my life mattered. I longed to be noticed, and I wondered apprehensively about the life that lay ahead of me. What is strange is that those same feelings have surfaced again recently, but I’m not fifteen now, I’m sixty-seven. What is happening to me? The next moment I looked to the right again and saw my answer.

Seated on the couch thirty feet away was an older man wearing a dapper red cap. He too was alone on a Friday night and I imagined that he had come to the mall just to be around other people. (Then again maybe he was waiting for his shoe shopping wife as I was, though I didn’t see a wedding ring.) I assumed that he was retired and when I did so, some feeling fluttered inside. Twice this past month I was asked if I was retired (No) and when I was going to retire (I don’t know). On both occasions I was irked by the question and felt defensive but didn’t know why. When I looked left and then right, at the teen and at the old man, it came to me. I was in a life stage transition again and the passage towards old age feels very similar to the teenage journey.

Life Transitions

For many of us as teenagers, the road ahead seemed foreboding. Unanswered questions related to college, career, and community loomed. Would we be able to find our role and place in the competitive, chaotic world of adults? Would someone notice us? Would we be able to find love? By the grace of God, I can answer “Yes!” to all of those questions.

But now a new set of questions loom. As old roles and responsibilities that created a sense of place in the world slowly slip away, as close friends struggle with cancer, as my creaky joints creak more and I imagine that my longevity on the planet could be predicated by a random lab test, I wonder, “Who sees me now? What gives me hope as losses increase around me? Where is my new place in the world?”

Christopher Bryant puts it this way, “Ideally the succession of little deaths which meet us from cradle to the grave, which we must undergo if we are to find fulfillment; can be met cheerfully in hope of what lies ahead and without backward glances. But owing to our condition of estrangement, we tend to cling tenaciously to the old and to face the new with reluctance and misgiving. We dread the loss of old security and of finding ourselves vulnerable. To overcome our dread our Author has come among us as a man among men, and as a man endured that dread at its extreme worst in order to break its power and rescue from its tyranny all who will trust themselves to him.”

Trust

It all comes down to a five letter word. Fifty years ago as a seventeen year old I heard the line, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. Trust Him!” I did and I am so grateful for what he has done. At age sixty-seven, the invitation is repeated, “Trust Him.” Not only is the word my source of hope, it is the source of hope for the girl in the orange jacket and the man in the red cap sitting at the mall on a Friday night.