from MANIFESTING DESTINY

When I was seventeen, I was musing on the future…imagining the next century: 2000. I thought it would be such an exciting moment in history. I imagined the giant celebration in Times Square…dancing, singing, parties, champagne…Then I calculated the age I would be when that exciting moment arrived. Fifty-seven! I plunged, momentarily, into a shallow well of despair. How absolutely depressing. I’d be an old woman…probably no one would want to celebrate with me. How lonely…
My vision (and accompanying imagined disappointments) of the new millennium didn’t actually materialize. It turned out that I had plenty of friends and I didn’t think for an instant that I was an old woman. None of us paid much attention to the moment the clocks and chimes and fireworks announced that it was 2000. I think a few of us got together, shared a great meal, drank some champagne and continued our lives…
Our lives. My life! Now, it’s more than fifty years since my seventeen year old self expressed dismay and distaste at aging---or rather at aging past the early 20’s…
I remember those 20’s…and the summer and other seasons of LOVE. I remember the slogan: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” My generation spouted that warning. However, as soon as a few of us turned thirty, the slogan disappeared. And we continued our lives…Me? I tried to do everything…I was so in love with life…with possibilities, ideas, challenges, places, accomplishments, things, people…myself…
Somewhere…in my 30’s, I recall reading a disturbing newspaper article about a sixty year old woman who was raped! Disgusting! Yes, I knew that rape was an act of anger and aggression…but…on a sixty year old woman! That was sick. I remembered that at age sixty. It was a quietly painful, poignant thing to remember.
I guess I’m old---as far as most people on this planet of youth would believe. Old. I can’t “wrap my head around the fact”---although the fact that I just said “wrap my head around…” indicates that I do not come from the world of the young…or of the middle aged.
Now, in order to find comfort with the very real fact that time moves--and in my case has moved quite far, I imagine being eighty-five. Now that’s old!
I even invented a private process to privately comfort myself about being sixty-seven. Okay…I close my eyes…I’m in the privacy of my boudoir…I get very still. Very relaxed and quiet. And then I imagine that I am eighty-five. I experience my eighty-five year old body. I can still walk okay but with a bit less bounce. I’m wearing practical shoes. I have some sort of ace bandage on one of my knees. There is prune juice in my refrigerator. With my eyes still closed, I survey the wrinkles and blotches on my skin…I notice that I keep several pairs of glasses at different spots around my house. I called my granddaughter by my daughter’s name. I no longer wanted to travel alone to exotic countries…
And then, from that eighty-five year old consciousness, I took a personal trip down memory lane…and I remembered being sixty-seven…and I smiled at the foolishness of that whippersnapper to think she was old when she was only sixty-seven. And I mused some more from that eighty-five year old place…”If I only knew then (at 67) what I know now.” And then…pause, pause…I open my actual eyes and celebrate the fact that I do know now what a less curious 67 year old might fail to know about the importance and opportunities and life that is around me, before me…And I celebrate the power of good strong rationalization. Because, why not? What is the alternative?!