I have always thought growing older was a quiet time. My 20’s and 40’s were interesting, fairly serene. But my 60’s are passionate. I grow more intense as I age — to my surprise, I burst out with hot convictions, unrestricted by the outer world of human quality in general, as I attempt to put things right, as though I still owed the world a debt to life.
You see, we could only be open to our own sentience — we’re not protected from life by engagements, pleasure and duties.
When I was very young, I knew inside of me what I could and could not accept, but I couldn’t express opposition when I am with other people. I try to find a point in myself from which to make a bridge to them. I work on eggshells of affection trying not to hurt or misjudge. Certainly this is very tiring…but love at any age takes everything you got. It doesn’t help me to think better, but it does ease my crabby heart.
In my sixties, love still interests and occupies me. I have endured the flame of living. I’ve suffered from its lacks, and I do daring. I also feel elation for what I have become. At times, I feel a sort of intoxication (although, friends humor me that I was born intoxicated) because of some small degree of gain.
As I grow even older, I wondered why love is equated with joy, when it is everything else as well. Devastation, balm, obsession, granting and receiving excess value and losing it again.
It is recognition, after of what you are not but might be. It sears as it heals. It is beyond pity — and also beyond tears, pain and pleasure. It can seem like truth, but what is the truth about an emotion that brings pain and joy…in one breath?
It is baffling to be loved by someone incapable of seeing you. At any age, it is pain to have your love claimed as a cloak that another may hide himself from.
Love tested by its indulgence to weakness or its blindness, or its blindness to unworthiness can turn to soar. Love may have blind facets in its well-seeing eyes, but it is we, who are blind of course. Love is the height and depth, the follies and the glory, but being loving is not always love…sometimes hate can be, more cleansing.
Which brings us to that question, why are love and hate near each other, opposite and alike and quickly interchangeable? Why is it capable of opening double gates of suffering? Is it because it sees clarity before judgment?
The moral discipline that makes you do all impossible — your gift of transcendence. I have learned not to look for love’s past in any relationship, in case love proves to be only the relief of losing ones self in a crowd of two.
You ask yourself, how much of the husband/lover is left for human purpose and how good does the human quality remain, while you, in that uncertain age, continue to strengthen your spirit, your soul? Because as a woman, they both have to be upright — soul and spirit — for reality’s sake, for prove, for style.
The chins would double, the wombs would fall — but a woman growing older will enjoy life with a wealth of patience, a treasury of endurance, immeasurable courage, cheer and kindness, encompassing all the nobility and humility of which we alone are capable. Happiness is someone I love.
Someone I could never have.
Something that could never be.
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected]
