Intimations of Mortality

I’ve always loved Wordsworth, and his "Intimations of Immortality" remains one of my favorite poems ("Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting …"), but I’ve been thinking of late more about the mortality side of things. A growing consciousness of that mortality seems to define this particular season of life.


A few years back, I penned the following haiku:

40th birthday --
the leaves just beginning
to change color

I wasn’t 40 at the time, and my birthday’s in spring, but, even at 35, I felt keenly the first hints of my own mortality: the inexorable movement of time, physical decline, the inevitability of death and loss. I feel it even more keenly know. The foot I injured two years ago still pains me. My blood pressure’s up and my blood sugar too high. My sideburns are shot through with gray. Our children move and mature at lightning speed—no matter how hard we try to hold onto them.

But this all sounds rather grim and melancholy, and I’m neither. We’ve been encouraging our children recently to "look for the good," to take a "glass half full" view of life. With that perspective in mind I’m encouraged to think that, if my luck is only about break even, I still have some 35-40 years left on this planet, and that’s a lot of mileage, and plenty of time to learn, and do, and see; to love and laugh and "suck the marrow" out of life, as Thoreau would say.

If I’m in the mid-summer of life, I’m certainly sorry that spring is forever behind me, and the fireflies will soon stop winking in the trees and the honeysuckle won’t smell quite so sweet, but Autumn promises its own beauties and adventures, and winter too, cold and clear, with time and space for peace and contemplation.

In the words of the Nissan TV commercial, "Life’s a journey, enjoy the ride."