To live life fully, embrace bowling alone
Having worked in community programs for many years, I know the language of contemporary aging: demographic bump, dual-eligible health insurance, medication reconciliation. I follow the procession of conferences and task forces that wrestle with social, health and economic issues.
Then I go home and talk to my friends — women in their 50s and 60s — and we laugh. We sound like the women we swore we’d never be. Oh, we still think we’re not our mothers. After all, our health care is alternative or beyond, and we joke about being boomers — OK, yes, those who research says won’t even answer when called that name. Nope, we are the largest group to age together in U.S. history, but we won’t come unless you call us one at a time. We’re special.
At night I do my ablutions with costly applications of hope-in-a-jar.
But sometimes, while using this cream or that serum, I look in the mirror and for just a second I see my real face and
I hear my heart beating. Even with a loving spouse in the next room I get it: I’m alone.
That’s what we neglect to talk about in aging circles. That’s the thing we hold at bay, and that is what we claim to not be and to not want to be: Alone.
Yes, I know, we are not supposed to bowl alone or want to. We inundate nursing homes with kids and dogs and, God help us, mimes and clowns, so that no one should notice that they are alone. In every report on aging we are insistent that community is better.
But is that really true?
We don’t get out of here alive, and we don’t go in groups. Could it be OK to age in solitude? What if the last third of our lives requires more aloneness — and even some loneliness — so that we can assess who we really are.
Sometimes it seems we are thinking that we can plan our way to staying alive forever. Of course, we know better. Except we don’t. I heard it again this week, someone my age saying, “If I knew I was going to die, I would…” And I think, “You don’t know you’re going to die?”
That is only depressing if you believe that urban planning and advances in medicine can remedy the deepest truth of human life: We are born, and we will die.
There is liberation in this. I swear there is. All of us older than 60 know the words to “Me and Bobby Mcgee.” Hum along with Janis Joplin late at night in that truck, “Freedom’s just another word for…”
We have nothing left to lose. That’s the good news and what we come to when we get quiet. Discernment — personal and political — comes from that deep, uncomfortable place, and it’s a place we only, finally, have the muscle for when we’re older.
But we can’t get there in groups. You really do have to bowl alone. You can participate in workshops and co-housing until your comfort shoes wear out, but one morning, walking alone, you see the light hit a tree a certain way and you feel a rush of grief and joy so powerful it takes your breath away. That’s when you know how short life is.
Yes, we need radical changes in our systems — in housing and health care. But the most radical change we need is this: Stop confusing planning with living. You have that mirror and that tree in slanted light. That’s where to begin.