The Hill
Recently I read a cartoon in which a woman is saying to a friend, “Jo, I think I’m depressed because I’m getting closer and closer to 40.” To which Jo replies, “Look on the bright side, Wendy. In a few years you’ll be getting farther and farther from 40.”
I know what Wendy is talking about, for over the last ten years I’ve felt a growing resistance to getting older. Each year I have adjusted my idea of when middle age begins. I have become wary of looking in the mirror. And I have begun to think I must have been born with a receded hairline. However, It’s becoming clear that I’m losing the argument as well as my hair. My peers now look middle-aged. Young people seem to have got much younger. And I’m coming up against an indisputable point. Next year I will be 40. No-one can push the start of middle age beyond that. “Wow,” my peers and I exclaim, “whoever would have believed it would really happen!” Yet there it is, no longer on the distant horizon but right in front of me: The Hill. And although Jack Benny managed to dig his heels in at 39 and for years avoided making the final step onto the summit of that dark mountain, I have no such magic. Next year I’ll be standing there, and in a year or two I’ll be over the hill and gathering speed on the fast slide down the other side.
Of course, my own resistance to growing old is characteristic of our culture. How often we try to distance age with surgery, regressive behaviour, or well-meaning compliments. For the idea of getting old evokes great fears: of being lonely, vulnerable, sick, or poor, to name a few. And what happens to us after we get old, if not before? Death lurks invisibly like a black hole ready to suck in and annihilate our bodies and minds and everything we have valued in our lives.
Forty: a one-way ticket making me say goodbye forever to the young person I used to be. It is a humbling leave-taking, for along with acknowledging my departed youth, I am having to let go of my adolescent fantasies. These are harder to release; a deeper self-image is at risk. But being near the top of The Hill gives me a long view back on my life. The patterns are clear. I can see who I have and have not been, and I do not see the person I fantasized I would be by now. I am being forced to face the fact that my dreams of making a splash in the world in one way or another were misguided and arose out of an emotional need for attention. The overwhelming probability is that I will come and go in this world with only a few friends and acquaintances ever knowing that I came and went. When they are dead, I will be gone completely. Already, the bold lines around my much-desired significance are fading. I merge into crowds, anonymous as the faces staring out of old brown photographs in museums. When I am dead, my only lasting footprints will be a few entries in institutional records. Some splash!
However, this depressing scenario is misleading, for if I avoid as far as possible the fearful reaction, the renewal of ambition in the campaign to be someone in the world, and instead surrender to the fact that I am the original Nobody, then the dead-end of obscurity becomes the main road of discovery and joy. When I choose as my only goal the Void, I can accept more easily that as a person I am limited and weak; that I am special in a few ways but ordinary in a lot more ways; and that I will soon die and be forgotten. And strangely, I discover that there is relief in being able to admit, even embrace, all this. There is relief, too, in seeing my human identity sink back into the crowd and the photograph where it belongs instead of trying to get it up on a pedestal separate from other people. In saying goodbye to not just my youth but to my whole human life, I can allow it to go home to where it belongs. And no longer quite so blinded by the need to see myself as significant, I can at last look back on my life and get to know myself as I have been rather than as I wanted to be. And I can be kind to myself.
But there is even better news than this. In being prompted by the visions from The Hill to shift emphasis away from needing to stand out among people and toward surrendering more fully to the Void, I inherit many qualities that flow directly out of the Emptiness, and while they are not quite as central or reliable as the Emptiness itself, they make a remarkable difference to the quality and meaning of life. For example, less distracted by the need to be creative to impress people, I can take my creativity as the Void much more seriously. As a result, I begin to own unbelievable creativity: the effortless beauty of sparrows singing in the Silence, a freeway vibrating with trucks in the perfection of the Given, and the singular face of a stranger glanced at on a street. The mysterious stars, difficult times, innocent children–all flow directly and easily from this central Emptiness. These are the real splashes in life, waves of great power and spontaneity crashing on the long shore of the Void. Everywhere I look are the creative expressions of this Nobody who has no other to impress. Compared to this level of creativity, personal creativity is marginal. And beyond creativity, I can also be prompted by my perspective from The Hill to own the immortality, the steadiness, and the resourcefulness of the Void. Paradoxically, the more I listen to what age tells me, the more I hear the songs of eternity.
In a real sense, of course, no-one can own or control these riches. In fact, this is the beauty of the arrangement, for it is only as No-one, as Emptiness that is surrendered and seeks nothing and is prepared for the worst, that I can experience the deeper joys as they flit in and out of Being, weaving patterns with the many dark emotions I will never cease to experience. And only as No-one can I value these joys and riches. My person cannot profit from them, cannot find that longed-for splash by claiming them as badges of specialness. Such a claim would tarnish them and would send me headlong down the slippery and scary slope to isolation and death.
And so it turns out that, contrary to much of what our culture tells us about growing old, The Hill offers us an opportunity and a blessing. When seen for the gift it is, age can motivate us, as in part it motivated the Buddha, to surrender to the Ageless and find there the real fulfillment of our potential. Anything that can do that is worth looking into.