On Approaching 50

I will celebrate my 50th birthday in less than two weeks. I am happy to say that I can honestly use the word "celebrate" to mark the occasion. I saw a t-shirt in a novelty shop the other day that was black and had the words "Oh crap, I turned 50." I considered buying it, but decided against it as that does not correctly communicate how I am feeling.

My feelings are more properly expressed in a passage from "All the Pretty Horses" a novel by Cormac MacCarthy. The main character, John Grady, is listening to the matron of a wealthy Mexican family tell the story of her youth. It is a story of captivity, rebellion, and hope bounded by the institutional walls of society that kept a young woman from realizing her dreams. The story revolved around one night many years  earlier when a young man had cried for her soul.

She tells Grady, "That night I thought long and not without despair about what must become of me. I wanted very much to be a person of value and I had to ask myself how this could be possible if there were not something like a soul or like a spirit that is in the life of a person and which could endure any misfortune or disfigurement and yet be no less for it. If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily. I knew that courage came with less struggle for some than for others but I believed that anyone who desired it could have it. That the desire was the thing itself. The thing itself. I could think of nothing else of which that was true."

As I crest this hill I find myself facing a new dawn rather than a sunset. I feel invigorated with courage from having turned away fear, embracing opportunity, and taking up the challenge to be a person of value. I am finding the courage to love, to share, and to savor more than ever before. I feel more alive, more aware, and more spiritual than ever before. I no longer need to fear what I do not know because I am in awe of what I have yet to learn. 

I have for a long time resisted the forces of fear and its minions, but the piece that I have been missing or at least have previously failed to fully embrace is courage. Not a macho bravado, which is merely a mask of fear, but courage as a spiritual experience that is greater than faith or belief. It is a constancy independent of fortune that I am consciously allowing to bloom in what has been a void.

As I approach fifty years of age, I consider myself the most fortunate man in the world, richly blessed with family, friends, health, and opportunity. I am humbled, excited, and eager to see what lies around the next bend in the road.

Thanks for reading.