I turned sixty earlier
this week. (In fact, it’s that year for many of my friends – Happy Birthday Dave, Gary, Tom, Craig, John, other Dave, etc., etc.!) But it has caused me to pause and
think about certain kinds of life change. Just when does senior adulthood begin, for example? For that matter,
when does an infant become a toddler, or a toddler a little girl, or a little
girl an adolescent, or an adolescent an adult? And this is to say nothing of the
conundrum of at just what point a person enters or exits the wonderfully and
ambivalently-phrased stage, ‘middle-age.’ I’m guessing that sixty must mean
that I am on the exit side of that poser, in spite of my denial. (Please, can’t
we make it sixty-five, the traditional retirement age? Or even seventy, when
the government insists I must start drawing Social Security?)
Change in nature can
seem equally ambivalent. It can be excruciatingly slow if we’re talking about
something like geologic time; or it can be surprisingly fast if we’re referring
to an abnormally warm spring thaw or to ephemeral blooms. William Bridges in
his book Transitions puts it this
way:
Throughout nature, growth or change
involves periodic accelerations and transformations: things go slowly for a
time and nothing seems to happen – until suddenly the eggshell cracks, the
branch blossoms, the tadpole’s tail shrinks away, the leaf falls, the bird
molts, the hibernation begins.
And this is to say
nothing of the baby dropping, the lake icing-out, the branch crashing down, the
tectonic plate shifting, the first snow flurrying, the rabbits scurrying or the
trout finally hitting my lonely fly.
So then, just like that,
am I now a senior adult? Let’s think about this.
Bridges says that human change
is different than that in the rest of the natural world, in that it tends to
consist of three stages or seasons: a season of endings, a neutral in-between zone,
and a season of new beginnings or possibilities. It’s usually not just *zap*
and I’m different. It takes time to move into change, and that neutral zone can
be accompanied by confusion and chaos, or by just plain reorientation. But the
neutral zone -- that middle place -- is very real, and critically important to navigate
well if life change is going to be understood and embraced. For just as in
nature more can be going on than meets the eye, more also is going on in all
three of these seasons than may always be seen. So the author continues to
clarify the differences between plain change and true transition. In short, change
is external, transition internal. Change is what happens to me, transition what takes place within me as a result of that change, either positively or
negatively. Change is inevitable; transition is a personal choice, and it’s in
that middle zone where healthy transition can form. Or not.
Change is inevitable, transition a
choice…
And though change is a normal part
of all of
nature, it is only us humans who
must
undergo, if we are willing, healthy
transition.
All this is to say that though
change is a normal part of all of nature, it is only us humans who must
undergo, if we are willing, healthy transition. Transition seems uniquely
human, at least in its spiritual, emotional and psychological dimensions. So I guess that leaves it up to me if I am now a senior adult. And since
people live in denial about all sorts of things – aging, self-awareness, fading
beauty (whatever that is), health challenges, addictions, loss of position, decreasing
skill, dying of a dream – I guess that also leaves it up to me about a lot of
those kinds of things; the last thing I want is to be one of those people.
Yup, not so suddenly I’m
a senior adult, or most certainly nearing the end of my neutral zone. But as I proclaim this, I also want to
lean into what the old King James Version of the Bible says:
The days of our years are threescore and ten;
And if
by reason of strength they be fourscore years,
Yet is their strength labor and sorrow;
For it
is soon cut off, and we fly away.
So teach us to number our days,
That we
may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
(Psalm 90:10, 12)
~~RGM, March 29, 2014
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