Thursday Th(ink)s - An Existential Birthday Overload

It’s Thursday, and I’m, as usual, Th(ink)ing.

Saturday was my 69th birthday, and Hubs gave me a gift only a lifelong scholar would think of:

a distillation of thoughts on time. His own, Saint Augustine’s, and Wendell Berry’s. Some

women get roses. Some get diamonds. I get footnotes. Don’t misunderstand, I like roses and

diamonds, but a man who quotes Augustine on your birthday is a keeper.

Birthdays have a way of pointing a finger at you and saying, none too subtly, “Gurlfriend! You’s

getting old!” I smile at the birthday-cake spook and say, “Sure am, honey. Light another candle.

I’m on fire, and I’m grateful for every hot minute.”

The cards this year were sweet. Age is just a number. You’re not getting older, you’re getting

better. Lovely. Also nonsense. Age is a number, and mine’s a hefty one. I’d like to talk about it

like a grown woman.

In Hub’s birthday footnotes, he went full 1970s on me, quoting Chicago’s “Does Anybody

Really Know What Time It Is?” The horn section, the bell-bottoms, and... is that a skunk?

Good question, Chi-town boys. But you’re a little slow. Augustine asked it sixteen hundred years

earlier:

Thank you, Saint Augustine. That’s exactly how I feel about my TV remote.

Here’s his answer, as Hubs, the existential surfer dude, boiled it down:

“The past no longer exists, except in our memory. The future doesn’t exist yet, except in our

expectation. And the present exists only in our attention, just long enough to become the past.”

1. Memory
2. Attention
3. Expectation

That’s all the time we ever hold.

If you skimmed that last bit because it got a little yada yada, I don’t blame you.

Philosophy is hard to make time for before happy hour. Ironic, I know.

Still with me? Good.

Herein lies the rub. How does one enjoy the minute when it’s gone before you can say “minute”?

Time announces itself constantly but never actually shows up. It’s a total no-show. Yet we still

invite it to our party!

Here’s what nobody prints on a card: at 69, the minutes go faster. A summer used to last a year.

Now a year lasts about a summer. And if I’m honest with my calculator, I have more minutes

behind me than in front of me. That’s not morbid. That’s arithmetic.

And this Sunday, some of us fall back an hour. It’s the only time anyone ever gives you time, and

the government takes it back in March.

Most days I suspect I waste the moment. I look up from my laptop and it’s Thursday again. But

do I waste it? Really? Or is “simply being present” all that time asks of me?

Of course, cue up Rudyard Kipling as he barges in like a gym teacher with a whistle:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run...

Every minute a lap. Every second a stride.

“Get a move on, sixty-nine-year-old woman!”

“Rudyard, dear, I hike. I’ve walked the Camino. I play catch with grandchildren. I think I’ve

earned a happy hour.”

The world has a sneaky way of telling women my age that we matter as long as we’re useful.

Babysitting, volunteering, baking for the funeral luncheon. Run the distance, ladies. I’d like to

suggest that a minute spent doing nothing but noticing is not a wasted minute. It may be the only

one I actually lived.

Wendell Berry, by way of Hubs’ birthday footnotes, offers a kinder view. He says you can’t stop

the present long enough to study it, and no clock ever built can measure it. It isn’t really a length

of time at all. He calls it “a leak in time,” a crack through which, if we’re quiet enough, eternity

falls on us.

That’s not an unforgiving minute. That’s a sacred one.

Berry goes further. We tell time by deaths, he says, but also by births. Some depart and others

arrive, and the hand that waves goodbye stays open to welcome.

I once had parents and grandparents. Now I have children and grandchildren. Somewhere in

between, without anyone asking me, I became the top row of the family photo. There’s no one

left above me to call and ask, “Is this normal?” I’m the one who gets called now.

And what holds all of it, Berry says, is love. Time is marked by the loves we lose, the loves that

arrive, and the gratitude that keeps loving what’s gone. Love is why the dead stay alive to us and

the unborn are already welcome.

Now let’s throw the time ball over to God.

When Moses asked God, “Who are you?” God didn’t answer I Was or I Will Be. He said I AM.

The only One who lives fully in the present introduced Himself there. And that’s where He keeps

inviting us to meet Him: in the leak, in the crack. Not in the minute we’re dreading or the one

we’re missing. This one.

Berry ends with a question for the old and the dying. Let’s be honest: “the old and the dying” is a

phrase I used to read about other people.

His question isn’t Have I loved enough? or Was I loved enough? but Was I grateful enough for

the love I gave and got, however much it was? Then he closes with a prayer I’m claiming as my

birthday wish:

“Let us pray to be grateful to the last.”

So, Kipling, I won’t be running sixty seconds’ worth of distance this year. I’ll be sitting in the

unforgiving minute with a second slice of cake, saying thank you.

Greeting cards like it when aging gets tied up with a bow. A sunset, a splash of roses, a verse that rhymes “golden years” with “no more tears.” Real life at 69 doesn’t rhyme. It comes with

gratitude and grief in the same envelope, a calendar that moves too fast, and a husband who

hands you Augustine instead of a card with a cozy cat on it.

I’m not signing up for the neat version. I’ll take the messy one, with the crack in it where eternity

leaks through.

Now pass the cake.

Big Brains: We should all start to live before we get too old. Fear is stupid. So are regrets.

— Marilyn Monroe

Old Souls: You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old.

— George Burns

The Ancient of Days: "Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save." Isaiah 46:4 (ESV)

Norma Jean:  
“Real life at 69 doesn’t rhyme.  It comes with gratitude 
and grief  in the same envelope.”

Thursday Chat: What’s one thing about getting older that you’ve never once seen on a greeting card?

What are you grateful for in this minute, mess and all? Leave a comment. I’d love to hear. And if a friend needs a little permission to stop pretending aging is tidy, pass this along.