The Sunset of Life

It's a rather ironic topic to post here today after we just had the Solstice which is the highpoint of the year, a celebration of the most light we in the Northern Hemisphere experience in a day, but it is on my mind. (Two Solstice oriented posts still to come.)

Where I am staying in Montana is an older home, a cottage, which the owners rent to others as a vacation home away from home. There are five horses on the property and one in the yard right with this house. She is a thoroughbred and 26 years old. In her prime she raced but when these owners got her, she had had years of physical abuse. She will live out her life on the banks of this little creek with plenty of food, other horses to nuzzle across a fence, but none to pick on her. She is skinny, frail, and not long for this world, and she is what reminds me of the seasons of life more than the Solstice.

Watching her as she walks around the perimeters of her world, I wonder (as I have with all old animals) does she know she is so old? I am old by age standards. Yes, I use pictures here, by watching lighting and angles, where I look younger than I am. A neighbor back home recently told me he had no idea I was my age. It doesn't matter whether I look in a mirror and see every one of those soon to be 64 years (and I frequently do), they are there. I feel them; and when I think of the horse and see her old body, I think about my own aging.

It's not in a bad way that I think about it. The Solstice yesterday was a time to glory in life. I even got a slight sunburn from that glorying (not on the agenda), but to truly glory in life means we must accept all its stages. The sunset, the declining years, those are part of the years where the juices once flowed freely and we could bound up mountains if we so chose. Nobody stays in a race horse mode. The latter years come, and it is up to us what we make of them-- but not whether they come. We can be depressed, or relish the fact we got here at all. We elderly get to experience all of life where so many have been denied that.

David Brooks wrote something, on a totally different topic, but it so fit what I was thinking about today-- how to make these last years really good ones. I believe, we do that, not by denying them but instead relishing them for what they are. Unlike the horse, who most likely does not know, we do know they are coming. What we expect could play a large role in what they become.

"We’re not primarily deciders. We’re primarily perceivers. The body receives huge amounts of information from the world, and what we primarily do is turn that data into a series of generalizations, stereotypes and theories that we can use to navigate our way through life. Once we’ve perceived a situation and construed it so that it fits one of the patterns we carry in our memory, we’ve pretty much rigged how we’re going to react, even though we haven’t consciously sat down to make a decision." by David Brooks New York Times.