I have begun writing this just after midnight on Thursday, October 14. At 8:30 this morning I will turn 69, which means that I will enter upon my 70th year, at the end of which I will arrive at the so-called Biblical age of three score and ten.

My mind, usually rather focused, has lately been distinctly blurry, I think because I have been looking this way and that, any way except the way that would force me to look at where I am. Oddly, I am listening just now to Bohuslav Martinu’s second cello concerto, which I first discovered when I was in my 30s — which was also the first time I found myself bothered by the inevitability of growing old. I felt remarkably old — or at least was painfully aware that I was growing older — when I was in my 30s.

Recently, I came upon something the actor David Niven is reported to have said: “Never resent growing older. Millions are denied the privilege.” This is a wise observation, and brings to mind something St. Augustine said: “No one has promised you tomorrow.”

Presuming that I remember my childhood with some degree of accuracy, it seems to me that we begin life absorbed in what we’re doing as we do it (which may well explain why such absorption later in life is so satisfying).

I suspect it is holidays and birthdays that give us our first sense of the future: We do not naturally look forward; we learn to, and once we reach a certain age, looking forward takes up a good deal of our energy. We start imagining what we are going to do when we grow up, and growing up is what we want to do most of all. Unfortunately, however much success or pleasure or even joy we may experience when we do grow up, being grown up I don’t think ever quite measures up to what we imagined it would be like when we were kids.

At any rate, one day, it’s as if you were back where you started: Everybody else goes to school or to work, but not you. There is one big difference: The future has become a distinctly indeterminate quantity, and now, when you look around, what you see isn’t anything to look forward to because, as the saying goes, you’ve been there and done that.

To be honest, in the morning, when I see kids heading to school, or milling about in the schoolyard — there’s a school right across the street from where I usually attend morning Mass — I feel a terrible sadness for the misfortunes and disappointments they will inevitably encounter in life (along, of course, with blessings and triumphs). 

So far, what I have found to be the most disconcerting thing about growing old is the sense that so much of one’s time on stage is past and that, however much may be left, the inevitable final exit grows ever nearer. I find this causes perplexity rather than fear. I don’t know quite what to make of it. I suppose I shall when the cue is given to depart for what Rabelais called “the Great Perhaps.” I just hope that Peter Pan was right, and that “to die will be an awfully big adventure.”

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
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