[Oe List ...] Earthrise @ 79

[Randy Williams]

John,

I can certainly commiserate. I will be 80 if I make to December. I’ve managed to avoid most of the medications, but I am aware of several “rites of passage” of sorts—hearing aids a few years ago, knee replacement a year ago and the sudden realization that I seem now to have more hair on my ears than on my head. Among the new insights that seem to come only with aging, I’ve become aware that at some point my focus has begun to shift from quantity to quality. I try to adhere to a regimen of physical exercise and maintain a healthy diet. But it tends now to be motivated more by the desire to live “well” than to live longer. It’s also interesting to note that I seem to have a little more control over the former than I do the the latter, but control is less an issue than going with the flow. I guess that too is part of the process. 

So may we and all like us be well,
Randy

> On Jul 4, 2018, at 4:47 PM, John Epps via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
> 
> Earthrise @ 79
> 
> Recently we were returning from a trip to Kansas and stopped for lunch at Denny’s in Limon, Colorado. We’d been watching storm clouds gathering on the horizon and were hoping to make it home before they hit. As we were leaving, I held the door for an obviously elderly couple – both were white-haired, somewhat bent-over, and he had a cane. Walking was a chore and pushing open the door would have taxed their capacities. They could obviously use some help, so I pushed open the door and held it as they struggled through. Then they uttered the words that still jar me: “Thank you, sir.” “Sir?” Coming from them? I was taught to use that term to refer to those older than I. That statement occasioned an interior rainstorm of reflections, including lots of wind, rain, and some hail.
> 
> Looking back over the last month, I’ve had more “sirs” thrown at me than at my senior year at The Citadel. There it was earned, deserved, and welcomed. Here it’s a surprising address heralding the onset of elder-ness that I didn’t think I had earned (yet) or deserved, and certainly not welcomed. There are plenty of signs, from the number of medications it takes to keep going to the diminishing energy and frequent naps. But I have ignored those as simply the afflictions of a young man with something gone wrong (to use a phrase from JWM). 
> 
> Reality will not be denied. It breaks through our facades.
> 
> This time it drove me to look at a work I’d heard about but never examined: “On Holy Living and Dying” by Jeremy Taylor published in 1839 (a century before my birth). I turned quickly to the section on Holy Dying. Here’s an excerpt. “A person is a bubble…all the world is a storm, and people rise up in their several generations…like bubbles descending from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world but to be born, that they may be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and those that live longest in the face of the waters, are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is everyone….”
> 
> This goes on for 10 pages with powerful images and the same message about our relative insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I found this strangely comforting, and not unsettling as one might assume. You just never know where wonder will break through, but when it does, it’s well worth celebrating.
> 
> John Epps
> 
> 
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