For those of you in your sixties and seventies and even beyond:

You may periodically get messages like the following, either subliminally or directly: "Your becoming is finished. What remains is arrangement. Tidy your affairs. Downsize. Distill your wisdom into digestible anecdotes for the young, who won't listen anyway. Make your peace."

I'm here to tell you that this is all a lie.

Here's what's true instead: You have more compost than anyone, 60 or 70 years of it. All of it has been breaking down in you this whole time, becoming the richest soil: every failure you metabolized, every love that ended oddly, every job that hollowed you out, every belief you had to abandon—plus all the glorious, gorgeous, generous stuff, too: the masterpieces you've crafted in the realms of art, intimacy, learning, and rigorous, vigorous living.

You're not running out of material. You're standing on a mountain of it.

And you now possess a power that younger people don't have access to: You have less to lose.

The career or reputation or vocation you've been nurturing and protecting has already given you a lot of what it's going to give you. The people whose approval you were angling for are either dead, irrelevant, or revealed as ordinary. The long apprenticeship in being palatable is over.

You are free.

Not free in some vague, inspirational-poster sense. Free in the specific, dangerous, operational sense of having little that you need to bargain away.

You can say the true thing at the dinner table. You can start the affair with the mandolin or the tide pools or the god you stopped believing in at 19.

You can become the disreputable elder who shows up with the wildest sign at the protest, who tells the family secret, who dyes their hair a color not found in nature, who falls in love at 74 with a preposterous intensity that embarrasses everyone but you.

Elders with nothing left to prove are a subversive force that our culture needs. That's why the culture works hard to convince elders that they're done.

I won't insult you with the fantasy that your body isn't changing. It is. Things hurt that didn't used to. Maybe the dead have started to outnumber the living in your address book. You have looked directly at the fact of your ending, and you didn't flinch.

Good. Now you know what a 25-year-old can't know: that the ending is real, and therefore this exact Tuesday and this specific slant of light isn't a rehearsal for something later. There is no later that isn't also this. Mortality isn't the thief of the present moment. It's the reason the present moment is worth so much.

So no: The story isn't over and you're not in the epilogue. You're in the part of the book where the protagonist has lost things they thought they needed and is finally, at long last, free to do ALL of what they came here to do.

You are still magnificently unfinished. You have simply been unfinished longer, and better, than everyone else.




The image is from the cover of a book by Eugene C. Bianchi: Elder Wisdom: Crafting Your Own Elderhood