A Certain Age, and the Certitude to Write
Maybe it's the M*A*S*H reruns that have become my nightcap to tame the thoughts of the day. Maybe it's the confirmation of my theory that white noise from about the age of 10 is particularly effective in this role as a subtle, individualized adult tranquilizer. Maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that M*A*S*H was interrupted in one commercial break by an offer to help the viewer go more often, and one to go less often. I'm reminded that I'm getting older. I'm reaching… a certain age.
Ever helpful, the cultural window that is television also offers perspective on what to do with the perspective that comes with one's advancing years. The patriarch on Downton Abbey, as I wind up my experience with the show, has also reached… a certain age. Through most of the 12 years that the show covers in its six seasons, Lord Grantham has steadily upheld his primary duty to honor that which has been passed down to by maintaining his family's station in society. Perhaps unwittingly, he has combined an honorable noblesse oblige for which 21st-century viewers might be a little nostalgic with insidious touchy, protective pride with which we are all too much familiar.
Lord Grantham's vintage is also accompanied by the bitter dregs of chest pains. Lady Grantham is understandably concerned. She tries to protect him from the stress of conflicted relationships, especially when she believes division there will undermine his fragile sense of his place in the world. She is startled when, just after suffering chest pains, he asks to speak with his daughter about an illegitimate grandchild the family has been treating as a ward. The subject has never been spoken of between them. NOW?!, puzzles Lady Grantham. With the stiff upper look particular to his country and class, Lord Grantham succinctly confesses, one never knows.
Prompted by reminders of his own mortality and the uncertainty of future opportunities, Lord Grantham names the unnameable and makes a sincere adult-to-adult peace with his daughter and her mistakes. What will we do with our similar reminders, whether they come from TV's most tacky commercials on bathroom issues, or from those moments when popular culture can be genuinely moving? I'm answering that question in part right now. I haven't Lord Grantham's name or estate to protect, a legacy he compares to a second wife and fourth child. I haven't, but my writer's pride is at least as imposing. The opinion of others that I would be a good writer has been enough of a lullaby to the ego to keep me from taking toddling steps in that direction. Do so, I feared, and the illusion of illustrious potential might lift. That siren's song of what might be could be replaced by specific critiques of sentence length or, to borrow from Lady Mary on Downton Abbey, discretion so discrete as to bore the reader.
Almost six months into my affirmation of the brevity of life's opportunities, and defiance of the expansive frailty of ego, I'm growing into the graying and receding hair of middle-age. Historian Will Durant and mega-success Stephen King both took this step, and their phrasing which I came across this morning describes this freestanding phase of maturation better than I can. Durant in The Reformation credits Erasmus with, "that secret and cherished egoism, or self-conceit, without which the writer or artist would be crushed in the ruthless rush of an indifferent world." I can lay claim to more of that than I possessed in January, if no other of Erasmus' talents. I've said what I came to say, and I've refined my ability to say it. At a certain age, that is not an insignificant battlefront on which to make progress.
In 11/22/63, Stephen King loans me an exceedingly unlikely voice with which to give this roar. An awkward old man brushes off the teacher's and narrator's attempts to extract an apology from a student who has made fun of him." It's not my job," he declares, to be anybody's teachable moment." This character is about, as it turns out, to literally open another dimension for the narrator. He has a clear sense of his individualized purpose, and he won't yield the time for the defense of the ego in the moment. To serve as someone's teachable moment because God grants the timing, the open ears, and the open eyes is gratifying. To seek to define oneself on fleeting evidence that one is a walking Teachable Moment is to ask to be frustrated. To ask for the butter may be funny, advises a writer to a comedienne on Studio 60. To ask for the laugh seldom is. So many moving parts in epiphany's equation are beyond our control. Likewise, as one of my more forthcoming readers told me early in this process, my voice is my voice. We, writers or not, he said, lose much when we try to be all things to all people.
How divinely appropriate, then, as I celebrate a certain independence from the fear of man which the Bible says is a snare, that I get truly memorable human commendation? The joyful worker I wrote about in February whose passion for those he serves was so exemplary stopped by. He stopped by in part to shave 90 seconds off my lunch time and remind me how touchy I can still be about such slights of my perceived prerogatives. He stopped by in part to tell me that his son whose creative dreams he encouraged despite what one might call their impracticality was flourishing and would be interviewing an up-and-coming star of US soccer. He also, when I admittedly asked, took the opportunity to let me know that he was still reading as I considered other subjects.
Just before I launched into this expansive reflection in which you have thus far indulged me, I got a response to my writing multiples more meaningful than the number of clicks on the blogs. I got a question. I got a specific question from the last paragraph of a lengthy, day-off, Bible-specific blog. For the first time in 12 years, three months, two weeks, and one day of disciplined blogging, someone reached out and expressed a desire to understand God's Word more clearly from encountering my words. His affirmation that I indeed provided the divine signpost will keep me writing, by God's grace, for the foreseeable future.
Ever helpful, the cultural window that is television also offers perspective on what to do with the perspective that comes with one's advancing years. The patriarch on Downton Abbey, as I wind up my experience with the show, has also reached… a certain age. Through most of the 12 years that the show covers in its six seasons, Lord Grantham has steadily upheld his primary duty to honor that which has been passed down to by maintaining his family's station in society. Perhaps unwittingly, he has combined an honorable noblesse oblige for which 21st-century viewers might be a little nostalgic with insidious touchy, protective pride with which we are all too much familiar.
Lord Grantham's vintage is also accompanied by the bitter dregs of chest pains. Lady Grantham is understandably concerned. She tries to protect him from the stress of conflicted relationships, especially when she believes division there will undermine his fragile sense of his place in the world. She is startled when, just after suffering chest pains, he asks to speak with his daughter about an illegitimate grandchild the family has been treating as a ward. The subject has never been spoken of between them. NOW?!, puzzles Lady Grantham. With the stiff upper look particular to his country and class, Lord Grantham succinctly confesses, one never knows.
Prompted by reminders of his own mortality and the uncertainty of future opportunities, Lord Grantham names the unnameable and makes a sincere adult-to-adult peace with his daughter and her mistakes. What will we do with our similar reminders, whether they come from TV's most tacky commercials on bathroom issues, or from those moments when popular culture can be genuinely moving? I'm answering that question in part right now. I haven't Lord Grantham's name or estate to protect, a legacy he compares to a second wife and fourth child. I haven't, but my writer's pride is at least as imposing. The opinion of others that I would be a good writer has been enough of a lullaby to the ego to keep me from taking toddling steps in that direction. Do so, I feared, and the illusion of illustrious potential might lift. That siren's song of what might be could be replaced by specific critiques of sentence length or, to borrow from Lady Mary on Downton Abbey, discretion so discrete as to bore the reader.
Almost six months into my affirmation of the brevity of life's opportunities, and defiance of the expansive frailty of ego, I'm growing into the graying and receding hair of middle-age. Historian Will Durant and mega-success Stephen King both took this step, and their phrasing which I came across this morning describes this freestanding phase of maturation better than I can. Durant in The Reformation credits Erasmus with, "that secret and cherished egoism, or self-conceit, without which the writer or artist would be crushed in the ruthless rush of an indifferent world." I can lay claim to more of that than I possessed in January, if no other of Erasmus' talents. I've said what I came to say, and I've refined my ability to say it. At a certain age, that is not an insignificant battlefront on which to make progress.
In 11/22/63, Stephen King loans me an exceedingly unlikely voice with which to give this roar. An awkward old man brushes off the teacher's and narrator's attempts to extract an apology from a student who has made fun of him." It's not my job," he declares, to be anybody's teachable moment." This character is about, as it turns out, to literally open another dimension for the narrator. He has a clear sense of his individualized purpose, and he won't yield the time for the defense of the ego in the moment. To serve as someone's teachable moment because God grants the timing, the open ears, and the open eyes is gratifying. To seek to define oneself on fleeting evidence that one is a walking Teachable Moment is to ask to be frustrated. To ask for the butter may be funny, advises a writer to a comedienne on Studio 60. To ask for the laugh seldom is. So many moving parts in epiphany's equation are beyond our control. Likewise, as one of my more forthcoming readers told me early in this process, my voice is my voice. We, writers or not, he said, lose much when we try to be all things to all people.
How divinely appropriate, then, as I celebrate a certain independence from the fear of man which the Bible says is a snare, that I get truly memorable human commendation? The joyful worker I wrote about in February whose passion for those he serves was so exemplary stopped by. He stopped by in part to shave 90 seconds off my lunch time and remind me how touchy I can still be about such slights of my perceived prerogatives. He stopped by in part to tell me that his son whose creative dreams he encouraged despite what one might call their impracticality was flourishing and would be interviewing an up-and-coming star of US soccer. He also, when I admittedly asked, took the opportunity to let me know that he was still reading as I considered other subjects.
Just before I launched into this expansive reflection in which you have thus far indulged me, I got a response to my writing multiples more meaningful than the number of clicks on the blogs. I got a question. I got a specific question from the last paragraph of a lengthy, day-off, Bible-specific blog. For the first time in 12 years, three months, two weeks, and one day of disciplined blogging, someone reached out and expressed a desire to understand God's Word more clearly from encountering my words. His affirmation that I indeed provided the divine signpost will keep me writing, by God's grace, for the foreseeable future.
Life's revelations, great and small, are too important not to be written down. Today's written words, after all, are the pieces in preparation that might be used to build bridges in our relationships tomorrow. What we first audition in the mind, then on the pen just may be used to move mountains in God's time.
A certain age... If I had a buck for every time I've been reminded that I'm not seventeen anymore, since my car accident, I could just about replace the car
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