Approaching my 70th birthday

Approaching my 70th birthday, my journey having arrived at the home stretch and the question is, "how are you going to live out the rest of your days" arises. Yesterday‘s mail from Social Security arrived with dire warnings that time was running out, that I  needed to register before my 70th birthday, brought it all home, full circle. It’s suddenly all very real. This aging process. Time is running out. I didn't sign up for this. Yet here I am. I feel lucky having lived a life rich in creativity and adventure. All the travel I’ve done continues to inform my sullied art. I got the adventuring out of the way in my 30s and 40s while I still had knees that worked. I swam in the Galapagos, traversed the Andes, straddled the equator, went to the USSR bearing gifts, lived in St. Petersburg and Amsterdam. how I loved those cities of light. I loved fiercely and mourned when the relationships inevitably failed. But I was always running from the past. It’s frightening to see how so many people begin that cognitive slope of decline long before they reach this age, but I must be one of the lucky ones. My mind is busy putting together thoughts and rebuttals, always ready for the next argument, always ready to challenge the norm, as if life itself depended upon it. But sometimes the fear rises up like an unwelcome tide. When I was 20 I couldn’t imagine myself at 50. When I was 50 I couldn’t imagine myself at 70. And yet here I am inside this uncharted wilderness of age, the same landscape of my childhood. What I’ve gained is knowledge but that’s cumulative. Knowledge is not wisdom. Joseph Campbell talked of the hero’s journey, those rites of passage, not gathering statistics or fact. Like what Einstein said, creativity is more important than knowledge. My hero’s journey, having survived a childhood where I was shunted off from parent to grandparent, with aunts and uncles threatening to either adopt me, or to send me off to boarding school, left me shaken, with no sense of home—so the hills became my refuge. I was a feral child. And from that world of uncertainty, I retreated to the realm of my horse, she became my escape, my solace. As I rode the long ridges of West Marin, we were like needle and thread stitching together the carpet of a storied life as we traversed fire roads, into a map that I could navigate and find my way back home. How am I going to live out the rest of my days, as best as I can, savoring the odd moments of ordinary beauty, while climbing that steep slope of that last mountain pass with one foot in front of the other.

7/14 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick