Seeds Over Saplings

Age gracefully.  Who values this phrase?  I have no inkling for others’ opinions, but for the span of my 40+ years youth has been more widely valued.  Ignore the perennial pursuit of women both to accentuate and prolong their youthful enticements (fashion, make up, diets, etc).  These things do not reflect how one ages but the years of fertility and heightened femininity, a relatively narrow window in time beyond which the odds decrease for securing a husband and bearing children.

Age gracefully.  The hyper intellectual asks in response, “what’s its opposite? What is it to age disgracefully?”  When you follow the themes of pop musicians with the staying power to last many decades, you can see distilled patterns of average people.  For example Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley of Kiss, that vaudevillian rock band from the seventies.  They were as much a raucous storyline as rock 'n’ roll musicians (and they did produce some quality stuff).  Fast forward four decades and you can find them waxing sagacious.  They have settled into a kind of live-and-let live form of wisdom.  They have traveled the wild ways and found a way of peace forged by lessons of wild days.  Is this aging gracefully?

Maybe.  It’s a relief to see that time enables learning and an escape from the traps we erect for ourselves when young.  But without diminishing the value of trial by fire, the boys of Kiss fail to draw the lesson beyond themselves.  To paraphrase: We have learned what works for us.  It does not serve them anymore.  So the extent of wisdom amounts to “been there, done that,” rather than, “I shouldn’t o’ done that.”  While not entirely disgraceful, it carries forward the kernel of self centeredness.  A disgrace would be to have learned nothing and continued whole hog in the wild ways, reckless into the grave.

Since my youth I have not resonated to the worry expressed by nearly everyone else about aging.  Age itself is no threat, but the universally unavoidable condition of living.  No point in fighting it.  I had more concern over what kind of old man I would become, and it only became a concern in light of three observations.  One, I had encountered some old persons who radiated joy with an innocence found in children, but well weathered, and therefore solid.  Two, I also encountered old persons who radiated bitterness and a generally sour demeanor.  Nothing of childhood innocence seemed present.  They, too, had been weathered, but instead were hard, brittle and small.  Third, I had noticed a correlation between this latter group and the desire to prolong the vitality of youth; the tighter one clings to it, the more likely one resents the inevitable passing of time.

The puzzle immediately presented itself.  Given that I will grow old, how can I find myself in the first group?  Clearly clinging to my youthful strengths would fail.  So I looked to the eternal—or I should say, “The Eternal,” the Holy Trinity, the Lord Jesus—and have been rewarded richly, while not avoiding trouble.[1]  Ironically among the eternal things I discovered the seeds of childhood, things that shone brightly in the first group, and barely in the second.  Somehow clinging to youthful strength runs counter to those seeds.  The younger, not the older, benefits aging more?

To be more specific, something about personality exists at birth and remains unchanged through time.  This can only be observed across generations, and retained in wise sayings handed down across ages.  For example, Genesis tells of Jacob and Esau, how at birth Jacob usurped his fraternal twin, pulling him back from the birth canal, making way for himself, Jacob, to be born first.  Babies don’t plot, they just do.  In some meaningful sense this is Jacob.  I have seen such continuity in my own children whose personalities as grownups, to my surprise, resemble the personalities that rolled, bumped and prodded in the womb.  Was it not so for me?  Surely it was.

When I gather all the personalities that I have encountered either directly or in historical tales, one thing becomes clear.  Each personality type has the capacity for refined or debauched moral character.  The debauched personality sees the most change, a kind of deterioration, a bland conformity that simply rejects all but self.  The refined moral personality, on the other hand, does not see an opposite effect of changed personality.  Rather the refined moral person finds a fuller expression of who he was in the beginning. 

“Growing up” oddly enough, turns out to be literal, not just a horticultural metaphor.  That seedling of personality can grow into a stunning cedar, a beautiful rose, a stately saguaro when it receives proper light, water and nourishment.  Proper.  That’s decisive, and where better find it than the Original Source?  To stay a sapling, shuts out proper nourishment, shuns the Source, stifling the cedar.  That was group two.  Group one was a garden, a vineyard, an orchard, a variety of grownup children—seeds become cedars and a host of beautiful blooms.

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[1] Only God knows why it is I have been spared extreme suffering.  In my opinion, I am not worthy to endure it.