Pop 89: Grown up
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
The first half of life, the philosophers say, is filled with survival concerns: group identity, money, status. We acquire our various disguises to get us through. Like every other animal, we lurk and work among the reeds and in the shadows. In our striped hides and mottled feathers, we do what it takes to survive, to fit in, to exert our assumed identities. This is, as the monk Richard Rohr calls it, our survival dance.
Then comes the second half of life. I personally have been in this half for a long time, even though I’m only just now admitting that I’m past the halfway point. I forget names and walk slower and can’t hold my liquor like I used to. Thank God. I am, as Gore Vidal once joked when he was around the same age as myself (63), “in the springtime of my senility.”
Rohr calls the second phase of one’s life “the sacred dance”. “You need to grow up,” he writes in “Loving the Two Halves of Life: The Further Journey.” I have felt drawn to this particular waltz all my life. As a teenager I never fit in, and I didn’t want to. I read books and walked a lot, secretly hoping I would walk off the face of the earth. I ate too much, out of loneliness and nerves, but I wrote a lot too. When I wasn’t drowning in self-pity I wrote toward the sacred. Although I never would have called it that.
I have an easily distracted soul. Much like a magpie, I swoop down on shiny objects. I move a lot, too – all over British Columbia, then across to Quebec and down to Tennessee, back to BC, over to Toronto, with stops in small town Michigan and surfside California, all places that inexplicably call me, move me, tug at my heart.
Some of my friends grant me a nomadic sensibility. Others, in recovery, see me as chasing another distraction, imbibing a geographical cure that never quite eases a restless, haunted and malcontented mind. What I do know is that the nomadic life provides many a brilliant jolt to the nervous system, presenting many shiny objects to illuminate and enlarge oneself for a good seven years or so, until the next big move.
It also forces one to travel light, to avoid getting a mortgage, to rent rather than own, to create small but cozy hives of belonging. I travel with my books and my little ritual objects and far more sweaters than I need. But I have no furniture. I depend on the kindness of landladies, my present one being Betty. Betty never comments on my book-crammed abode or the skulls adorning the back yard. At least not to me, which is just fine. I happen to think Betty’s a nomad at heart. She likes to meet new people and will dive into a deep conversation about the meaning of life between making supper for the family, bailing hay or bagging candies for the canteen at the rodeo or bonspiel. She runs interference between me and my critics. And nothing, I mean nothing, shocks her. Betty is one of those women whose life is built around her family, but she could just as easily hit the road in her truck and drive nonstop to Mexico. Betty would be interested in my new theories about the sacred dance segment of life, the one we are both in now.
Back to Rohr’s theory about the second half of one’s life. You’ve got to go through the first half to get to the second half, says Rohr. Because “every level of growth builds on the previous ones. The principle of transcendence means including all the previous stages of life. You will no longer put too much energy into just looking good, making money, feeling secure at all costs, and making sure you are right and others are wrong. That’s what it means to grow up.” To be grown.
I’ve wondered why this idea pleases me so much and I finally figured it out this past week visiting with two sisters and my brother on his little farm on Cortes Island. Over beers and seafood, in front of a crackling fire while the rain fed the ancient giant fir trees leaning in as if listening, we came to the glorious realization that NOW is the stage of our lives where all the work we’ve done, collectively and individually, sorting through the faith of our father and the creative passion of our mother, has come to fruition.
Through childhood squabbles and escapes from the family home, through the misunderstandings and hollering at full volume, through all the apologies, therapies, prayers and penances we have survived. Life has brought us to this point: we are all now in our sixties and it’s bloody well time to finally reap the rewards for having each done the hard work.
Throughout our youthful earnestness and exuberances, through middle-aged crises and exhaustions, through broken relationships and empty nests, we siblings have worked hard to maintain a respect and communication that has weathered innumerable storms. We have formed a bond that cannot be broken, no matter what. And that bond, tested by losses of faith, distances traveled, several servings of humble pie, and these days, the hard edges of a pandemic some call fear and others call flu, has not broken. Why? Because we have not turned our backs on the early stages that brought us here, like rungs of a ladder leading us upward.
Oh my God, we say, looking at photos we take of each other with our phones. I look old! But I don’t feel old. No, neither do I say. I keep thinking I’m seventeen. Ok, not seventeen, but thirty-seven, I say. But you are, says my brother. You are not just this year, you are all the years that brought you here: seventeen, twenty-seven, thirty-seven, forty-seven and fifty-seven.
And now we get to dance, not the dance of trying to fit in, but the full dance of the grown.