The Shape of Things to Come

I am always pleased when a meditation rounds out—comes back to where it started with a
sense of completion. I never know where this process will take me, but I hope, when con-
templating an uncomfortable truth, that my uneasiness will resolve into some kind of deeper
understanding.

I like to think that life rounds out as well, that with age comes wisdom, a sense of completion
and fullness, but the evidence is not reassuring. I worry that life simply attenuates. I have
frequently heard older people say, “we have downsized out of our big house,” and I say this
too, but not without trepidation.

We don’t have room for as many things. We have gotten rid of much. We hesitate to add
anything because there is less space in our condo. At a certain stage of life each acquisition
is an affirmation, a statement that life grows in possibility, endlessly opening outward. The
promise shimmers, almost, almost infinite. In shedding the things we so joyfully accumu-
lated we acknowledge the opposite.

At my 65th birthday party I was talking to my friend Alice. I was aware she was older than
me, but I wasn’t exactly sure how much older. She knew, she said, because she had attended
my 60th birthday party. “I’m ten years older,” she declared emphatically, adding that she
remembered feeling at that previous party that it was unfair.

I think of Alice and of the Alice in the children’s song who disappears down the drain, and
it seems to me my friend Alice is attenuating. Partly this is because she is so thin—she
maintains her weight with a ferocious attention to her diet and exercise—and partly be-
cause she has withdrawn from life in many ways. I’ve known her for about 15 years, since
before she retired from a career as a high school art teacher. It may be she has always found
the world a bit of a burden, but I don’t really know—this attitude may only have developed
in recent years. Nevertheless, for her, now, this is freedom, a freedom that she recognizes as
conditional and limited.

I have travelled half the distance to the age that Alice called unfair and am discomforted at
the prospect. I worry about my own life attenuating. I too eat carefully and exercise regu-
larly, and I hope that my good habits will carry me along for many years still. Nevertheless,
I have seen enough friends slip over the edge to perceive life as somewhat fragile. I am
concerned—a concerned citizen!—but don’t know what to do, don’t know what to think. I
am a firm believer in social action, but organizing won’t help. There is no civil disobedience
to address this injustice. Demonstrating won’t set it right.

I ask myself, what can I do to change the shape of my life, to round it out rather than see it
gradually diminish like a line narrowing to a point, to find some wisdom that will promote
a sense of fullness rather than loss. A good diet may add some days, but it neither fills nor
empties the spirit. Exercise may keep me fit a little longer—may even enliven me mentally—but
it doesn’t make the fact of my own mortality any more palatable. Nor am I prepared to find sus-
tenance in extrapolated beliefs. I have my own life, just that, my animal being, the elemental gifts
and losses of being human, love for a few people with whom I have shared my life, pleasure
in the artistry and ingenuity of human creation, delight in the beauty that surrounds me—the
trees, water, stars—just these, and when I am in a certain frame of mind, they are enough.

—from “The Meditations of David Esperanza” a work in progress by David Cole, Bay
Tree Publishing, www.baytreepublish.com