Turning 60

I never understood why people thought birthdays were such a big deal until I married into a different culture from mine where families gathered to honor the life of one of its members. It was a totally new and foreign experience for me since in my family of origin, our lives were not celebrated as anything particularly special. Our mother would usually make the obligatory cake as acknowledgement of another birthday but that was about it. I never got the sense that our parents were grateful to have three children--my brother, sister and me--so it was an awakening to experience real joyful celebration over the life of another human being when birthdays came around.

In just three days on March 21st, I will turn 60 and officially become "old." I don't feel 60. I don't feel any age at all really. I'm just the same spirit I have always been but living now in an aging body, and I still have a lot of fun to experience and to share with others. I can choose how I will age. I don't have to accept for myself our materialistic youth-driven culture's views of senior citizens as obsolete, a burden and drain on society. I can consciously age while still affirming my value as a human being. I still have a few years of gainful employment before retirement. Yes, the baby boomers are reaching 50 and 60 and in just a few short years, we'll be retiring. Will Social Security go bankrupt and our country's very economic stability be put in jeopardy because so many of us are growing old and requiring support? There is a real fear in this country that it might be so especially among the young who will have to support us in our old age.

Many women my age and sadly even younger have succumbed to the social pressure of hiding their age by having a plastic surgeon recarve their bodies--to nip and tuck, liposuction the fat out of their thighs, and undergo breast implants--just to hold onto some semblance of youth. The television media promotes this ridiculous desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable in shows like "Extreme Makeover." I am not going to carve up my body just so it will look younger. I'm going to save a lot of money too by not buying age-defying cosmetics. Instead, I've decided to monitor the inexorable process of aging taking place in my body as "age spots" and wrinkles appear on my hands once smooth and "crow's feet" plant themselves at the outer edges of my eyes. When I wash my face in the morning before work, I may find interesting the dark puffy circles forming below my lower eyelids. As I comb my hair I may notice it thining out. I may observe where small vericose veins are cropping up on my legs. I've got this idea of developing a fascinating curriculum for conscious aging into Judith, the "senior citizen."

In his book Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying, Ram Dass refers to aging as "the long process of ripening into God" which is the soul's journey. He looks at his own aging process and its attendant losses. Yes, it's true that we do lose relationships as friends and loved ones die. I already have lost my best friend in the whole world, Eunice Wilson, to cancer. But in losing her friendship of 18 years, I became the godmother to her children and grandchildren. I will eventually lose my physical strength, my ability to work, my mobility and have to give up driving because my senses will grow dim. But instead of focusing on the losses that will inevitably come with aging, I've decided to celebrate my 60th birthday by joining a Richmond chapter of the Red Hat Society, an international and multicultural group of women. I'm going to kick up my heels and have lots of adventures with other like-minded sisters willing to remain open to change so that we do not live in fear of the future. I'm going salsa dancing with my Divas and a trip to Atlantic City is in the works. I've signed up to take a belly dancing class as a fun way to exercise. I'm going to keep my sense of humor as my body sags into the senior years. I'm going to notice the elderly more and be kinder to them. I won't rush past them as I did in my younger days, wishing they'd hurry up. I've already slowed my pace mainly because I don't see the point of rushing so much anymore. I want to savor the time I have left.

I live in a society that is preoccupied with speed. One day Ram Dass watched an elderly couple at a crosswalk on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where the pace is "a barely controlled mania." They were walking very slowly and leaning on each other for support as people in their cars, horns honking, whizzed past trying to catch the changing light. How hostile the environment was to these older people, he thought. People were pushing them to move faster, and they just stood in the crosswalk, confused. "They were like Martians in a way," he wrote, "because the fast culture was so different from their pace. I realized the violence done to the spirit of the elderly by our time-obsessed culture."

Everyone lives with his or her own perception of time. There are different kinds of time--objective, psychological, cultural and soul or "Kairos" time. Objective time is the clock-on-the-wall time. It's Greenwich mean time. Psychological time involves the way I experience time--for example, it drags on when I'm bored and flies by when I'm involved in meaningful work or otherwise having fun. Every day when I go to and from work, many folks rush by me as if they could be rabbits in "Alice in Wonderland." They are hurrying to get to work. They're in their psychological time. Every morning outside the building where I work, a homeless man begs for loose change. "Can you help me out?" He has lots of psychological time. Then there's cultural time that depends on this society's rapid pace and how it defines time as money, something to be spent or to have like other material possessions. Finally, there's soul time or "Kairos" time. When I am in soul time, I am aware of the sacredness in every moment. The culture I live in doesn't pay much attention to the sacred in everyday life, but in soul time, I stop the mad rat race and reflect on my life. In soul time, I come into the present moment. I meditate in silence, letting go of my busyness. Then I become aware of how sacred my life is and what a gift it is to be alive in this human body. Soul time replenishes my physical and mental energy, and my spirit as well. If I can be present in each moment of my life, even as my body ages, Ram Dass says I will "learn to move in eternal rhythms through the temporal world." That's what I plan to do now that I've turned 60.