Anam Cara

They work like hell to get everything worked out and everything achieved, and then they believe that when they have that done, they will have time to enjoy. Some of them do actually achieve it. But sometimes if you get into that habit too deeply, you become what you do, and even when you have the time, you are not actually able to enjoy it. Ideally, old age can be a time of great liberation and freedom. It is a time when a lot of the social mystification and mythology calms down, and you return to the essence of things. I think it is not accidental that the body is pared down in old age, because it is part of the creative process. If you are writing a poem, you might have fifty versions of the poem, and might ultimately end up with six or seven lines after maybe having written sixteen hundred lines. The distilled essence comes out. I think in old age, with the paring down of the body, the paring down of social connection and the paring down of mobility, there is a chance for the distilled essence to actually show itself. You often glimpse that distillation in the faces or the eyes of old people. To put it another way, old age is a time of theater. Very often the old body is the ultimate actor’s disguise, and inside that old body is pure distilled essence, and it is a gracious, sacramental moment when you meet it. Patrick Kavanagh has said that we were taught to prepare for life rather than to live it.

That is maybe the primary intention of all holiness, spirituality and love—to free us for our lives. Gabriel García Márquez said somewhere that to live is an art, and no sooner have we begun to learn it than it is already time for us to be departing. There are people now at this moment confronted with their leave-taking. They will be going out of the world in an hour, in a week or whatever, and would give anything to have another week or a month or a year, and they won’t have it. And here are we, even if we are old, we still have time, and time is always full of possibility. It would really be a great gift that an old person could give to themselves, the gift of recognizing the possibilities that are in that time, and to use their imagination. The imagination is the gateway to a full life, and people who awaken their imagination come in to a force field of possibility and there are doors opening everywhere. I think it is unknown what you can do if you begin to see it. But so often, we allow the image that other people have of us to stop us from entering our lives and we become literally what they want. I think in old age you are gone beyond that! You have wild permission! Old people could become very subversive and very fascinating if they actually claimed the possibilities that they had and if they talked out a bit more, said what they feel and didn’t stand back and let the so-called young people, the yuppies and the entrepreneurs, run the whole show. Old people have far more fascinating things to say than an awful lot of what passes for wisdom in contemporary culture. It would be lovely to hear them speak.

One of the most amazing poets of the twentieth century is Czesław Miłosz, and he has a beautiful poem on old age called “A New Province.” There is a lovely line from another poet, Derek Walcott, where he says, “Feast on your life.” There is nothing more beautiful that can be put on the table of your mind than the feast of your own life. To put it another way altogether and to use a Catholic metaphor: every person’s life is a Eucharist, an individual Eucharist, and you are the priestess or the priest who makes the sacrament of your own life happen, and so we should get dangerously into celebrating.

There is also a poem from Octavio Paz that I love. It is one of the poems in his amazing collection Eagle or Sun? and it is about old age as a time of liberation from all the falsities that you burdened yourself with:

With great difficulty, advancing by millimeters

each year,

I carve a road out of the rock.

For millennia my teeth have wasted and my

nails broken

to get there, to the other side,

to the light and the open air.

And now that my hands bleed and my teeth

tremble,

unsure, in a cavity cracked by thirst and dust,

I pause and contemplate my work:

I have spent the second part of my life

breaking the stones, drilling the walls, smashing

the doors,

removing the obstacles I placed between the

light and myself

in the first part of my life.

For Old Age

May the light of your soul mind you.

May all your worry and anxiousness about your age

Be transfigured.

May you be given wisdom for the eyes of your soul

To see this as a time of gracious harvesting.

May you have the passion to heal what has hurt you,

And allow it to come closer and become one with you.

May you have great dignity,

And a sense of how free you are,

Above all, may you be given the wonderful gift

Of meeting the eternal light that is within you.

May you be blessed;

And may you find a wonderful love

In your self for your self.