Cabbages and Towers

Moving Again and Old Age

Three years ago, I wrote “Becoming Home”, an article about moving specifically from St. Louis, Missouri to Charleston, South Carolina. I spoke of the need to shed so much of what we had collected and how exhausting moving is because you are in truth reshaping your identity. Sure, we are not merely our things, but our things are inextricably bound up with who we are and how we see ourselves in spite of how distasteful that may seem. Our home is an act of creation comprised of experiences that are somehow linked to place. Moving is such a demanding business because of what we involuntarily leave behind as well as what we must voluntarily relinquish. And then there is the really hard work of creating our home from nothing. There is nothing quite like that first night in one’s new home. The feeling of being a stranger in our own home. Indeed, we are strangers who must rescue our new home from the ghosts of those who previously inhabited it. The markings on the door lintel recording the heights of the previous inhabitant’s children need to be painted over, colors are changed, we scrub away the residue of the dwelling’s prior inhabitants to create a tabula rasa on which to build our new home filling it with memories, stories, traditions that are uniquely our own. Our aim is to make it a safe space, a place where we are nourished, find comfort, and from which we draw energy to confidently leave to face the pervasive uncertainties of the world beyond our home’s boundaries.

So, I just reminded myself why moving seems such a crazy thing to do at this point in my life and yet, Lynda and I have moved again. Several months ago, we listed our home in Charleston and moved almost 3000 miles to McMinnville, Oregon. The two of us along with our three Whippets drove across country to our new place where we camped for 5 days in our new house waiting for our belongings. We have moved seven times in our twenty-seven years of marriage. Given the minor traumatic impact of moving, again, I couldn’t help but wonder what in the world we were doing — getting bundled up at 2:30 am to take the dogs from the fourth floor to the yellow spotted grassy area designated for dogs in Springfield, Ill, Omaha, Nebraska, Cheyenne, WY, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Boise, Idaho. In some instances, our moves were driven by new jobs but in most, it was about believing the new place had something to offer that was worth enduring the pangs of moving. I have asked people who moved frequently, if the move significantly improved the quality of their life, if they found what they were looking for, and, of course, the answers always fall somewhere in the middle between yes and no because as Jon Kabat-Zinn famously wrote, ‘wherever you go, there you are.” For all that we voluntarily and involuntarily abandon, for all the efforts to erase or somehow integrate the footprints of those who preceded us, we do bring ourselves with a considerable load of baggage. I have spoken with friends engaged in 12 Step programs who refer to moving with an eye toward improving their life’s circumstances as “pulling a geographic” i.e. all your problems move with you. We can’t escape the past we carry as a snail does its home. We slog it all from place to place, a repository for the wisdom of a life richly lived. But our journey is defined by fits and starts. Moving from one stage to another is hardly a smooth operation but a fitful process with our regressing one moment and progressing the next. Our aim is not to weave the perfect life journey story but to allow the wisdom gained at each stage of our development inform those that follow.

As we pondered moving back to the west coast, proximity to family figured prominently. But there is more that I felt might be worth discussing in this article. At 74 years the oft overused term “life journey” is increasingly meaningful to me. Where, I wondered, did I want this move to figure in my life’s journey. When I speak of a life journey, I don’t view it as a single integrated story that over time is about one’s achieving or somehow fulfilling their destiny. Rather, life to me, seems comprised of many stories where the most meaningful are tied to certain stages of human development. Each of these stories is typically discrete and intense with a discernible beginning, evolution and discovery process that finds completion in some sort of ritualized manner in which learnings are recognized and symbolically celebrated or honored. Our life journey is the narrative we create that attempts to weave the many discrete stories that arise in the course of encountering these developmental stages into something like an epic tale.

These discrete stories are perhaps best known by the rituals associated with them. Think birth (Baptism, Bris), coming of age (Confirmation, Bar/Bat Mitzvah), Pair Bonding (going steady, engagement, marriage). And consider the rituals associated with the decision to have children, pregnancy, launching children, retirement, and so forth. Profoundly aware of my own mortality at age 74, I wondered about the manner in which we ritualize old age, and what I was doing to mark my passage into this infrequently discussed time of life. It is a wonder we don’t discuss and explore it more given there is nothing especially subtle about the business of growing old. There are distinct markers that define this developmental stage including the often-dramatic changes we undergo physically. Not insignificant is simply accepting the designation of “old age” without collapsing into it and abandoning vitality.

The Western world is not especially welcoming of this developmental stage in spite of its inevitability so there are lessons to be learned from people and places less “old-age avoidant”. Across most cultures and countries, it seems nearly universal that old age is fundamentally about the relinquishment of power as is expressed for example, in retirement. Some of the world’s most notable historical figures provided us with role models for ritualizing this stage of development. Diocletian abdicated the Roman Empire in 305 AD at the height of its stability and retired to his palace on the Adriatic in the town of Split where he grew cabbages. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI resigned and retired to a monastery on the grounds of the Vatican. Carl Jung built the Bollingen Tower on Lake Zurich with his own hands beginning in 1923. In his old age it became his primary residence where he lived without electricity, telephone, running water and wrote his Memories, Dreams and Reflections which essentially wove the discrete stories of his life into a final narrative about his life’s meaning. Old age is a stage characterized by renunciations and departures as practiced by devout Hindus. For them, old age is divided into two stages: First, when grandchildren arrive, the householder begins the process of withdrawing from active social and economic life responsibilities and transferring these to the next generation. The aim of this is to allow for an inward turning and simplification of one’s life. The final developmental stage, Sannyasa is complete renunciation during which the subject performs their own funeral as a means to prepare liberation or moksha.

Old age carries with it the responsibility of being a keeper, or repository for the family story as well as the dispenser of wisdom, objects, and authority. For others, old age has been a time to complete tasks or projects that have followed one throughout their life. I referenced Nonno in a poem I published last month. Nonno, an aging poet in Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana who, while seeming to suffer from mild dementia is searching for the final verse of a poem he has been working on for years. When he finds the right words, he passes away shortly after. Goethe completed Part II of Faust at 82, a project he had been working on for 60 years. Verdi wrote Falstaff at age 79. Thomas Merton, while chronologically young, in the final decade of his life fought with his superiors about his desire to live as a hermit within the monastery grounds. This final decade was marked by the gradual dissolution or minimally porosity of barriers between his understanding of his traditions and those of the East.

What does all this mean for me, and what has it to do with our recent move? I think what I am slowly recognizing is that this move is less about geography than about placement. I have come to view it as a conscious act of self-location at a particular stage of life. The Hindu householder does not simply drift into the inward turn; he chooses it, marks it, begins it. Perhaps that is what Lynda and I have done, fumbling and deliberate in equal measure. We are nearer to our children and grandchildren, which is its own form of relinquishment — the admission that proximity matters, that time is not abstract, that the family story needs tending. There are projects that have followed me for years, a novel still waiting for its final shape, essays that want writing, poems that Lynda and I have not yet found words for. These do not feel like burdens. They feel like the work of this stage, and McMinnville, for reasons we are still discovering, feels like the right place to do it. Nonno found his final verse. I am still listening for mine

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