When I’m sixty-four: A birthday reflection
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I'm sixty-four
~The Beatles
Exactly five Aprils ago, smack dab in the middle of the pandemic, I pushed my humble little website Teaching & Being into the world and published my very first blog. This baby was part passion project and part leap of faith, born of my simple desire to write more regularly and to begin to share my work. Five years later, I’ve published 57 blogs, dozens of new poems and a large handful of education articles. Lately, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I unabashedly reply that I’m a teacher—and a writer.
And that is the profoundly good thing about being a woman of a certain age—a woman who has gradually grown into her own confidence and who is proudly celebrating her 64th birthday today. Not only do I get to define myself, but I finally understand how much the small things matter and just as importantly, how much doing the small things consistently over time can become a very big thing. And, the icing on the cake—I don’t need anyone but me to authorize or acknowledge my success. My experience and perspective have shown me that if I feel deep purpose and satisfaction in my work, then my work is important. If I devote myself regularly to writing articles and poems that people read and occasionally tell me they were moved by or interested in or even angered by, then I am very comfortable calling myself a writer.
This insight, which, honestly didn’t fully arrive until recently—alongside my birthday and the birthday of my blog—has prompted me to spend time over the past week reflecting on my writing practice and indulging in a thorough reread of each of the 56 blogs that came before this one. What can I learn about myself from what I’ve written in the past five years? What has changed for me?
It turns out, quite a lot. To put it plainly, the losses have begun to pile up, and I’m not talking about lost jobs or opportunities or even relationships; I’m talking about death. When you are in your 60’s, inevitably, death inches nearer and nearer in a very consistent way. There are the timely deaths of our parents and our friends’ parents, the sad and unexpected deaths of our contemporaries and, of course, the tragic and shocking deaths of young people, like the heartbreaking loss of a 22-year-old former student last week or my daughter’s high school friend last year. For me, each loss prods me to think more intentionally about the time limits of my own life. I can’t help but ask myself questions like: Am I doing enough in this world to leave things a little better than I found them? Am I honoring my most important gifts and passions? If I knew I only had 15 good summers left, how would I spend the one in front of me?
The good news is that as we get older, we find ourselves uniquely able to hold both the grief and the glory of the human condition. When death brushes too close, it tends to remind us of just how short life is and how lucky we are to have more of it. Seen through the heartbreaking and joyous lens of time and experience, life becomes infinitely more precious and valuable. Year by year, I understand this more and it underscores my deep belief that I am more myself at this moment than I have ever been.
What I learned from rereading my words over the past five years is that writing reveals and amplifies this truth. Not only has my writing practice been a way for me to explore a world of ideas, but it has been a way for me to explore my inner landscape. Writing does not simply reflect my ideas, it is a channel from which they flow and are revealed. Through my writing, I am able to trace a a crooked journey through time that reflects all the different parts of me. I write about my work in the classroom—both the theoretical and practical aspects of doing this work that I love for more than three decades. I write about mindfulness, neurology and positive psychology. I write about the power of attention and my love of sports and travel and poetry. And most recently, I write about the state of the world and reflect on the ways that I can use my voice and my agency to advocate for my students, for our planet and for the ideals that I hold dearest.
Many times over the past five years, I came to this desk feeling heavy with the world, uncertain about what to say and overwhelmed by a schedule that left little time to sit down at my desk and write. Nonetheless, I consistently made time to sit down at my desk and write. I trusted my own process and was increasingly rewarded by words that somehow morphed into a coherent set of ideas and finally, into a piece of writing that said something I wanted to say.
And, that’s really what I’m celebrating today—the gift that this little enterprise has given me: the trusting of my own small voice and my growing certainty that my writing practice is the surest route to where I want to spend the remainder of my one wild and precious life.
