Turns Out, I Was Wrong About a Few Things

Notes on Aging, Wisdom, and the Grace of Uncertainty

Our culture has a peculiar relationship with growing old. Youth is something we photograph. Age is something we crop out. We spend a small fortune trying to erase the evidence that we have actually survived our lives. But I’m beginning to suspect that age has been unfairly represented.

By the time you reach my age, you have walked through enough seasons to know that nothing stays on its assigned side of the fence. Joy wanders into sorrow. Grief carries love inside it. Wisdom occasionally makes a complete fool of itself. Strength learns how to surrender. And innocence, if we are fortunate, somehow survives experience. Even life and death, once imagined as distant shores, begin to share the same horizon.

Maybe that is what the years are trying to teach us. Not how to conquer one thing with another, but how to hold them together. To listen without quietly constructing our rebuttal. To speak without needing the last word. To love without requiring a particular ending. To welcome what comes, bless what stays, and release what leaves.

I spent much of the first half of my life sorting the world into neat little piles: right and wrong, success and failure, sacred and ordinary, me and you, us and them. I drew lines and gave things names. I knew where everything belonged—or at least I thought I did. I carried more certainty in those days. Age, in its quiet mercy, has loosened my grip on much of it.

Perhaps the work of these later years is different. Perhaps now we begin gathering what we once pulled apart. We set joy beside sorrow and discover they have always known each other. We make room for knowing and mystery, for doing and being, for holding on and letting go, for living and dying. And slowly, almost without noticing, the old boundaries soften. The lines we once drew so carefully begin to fade, and what seemed like separate pieces begin to reveal themselves as belonging to one another.

Until one day, perhaps, we look at this strange, beautiful, unfinished life and realize there were never really pieces at all. There was only this. One life. One mystery. One seamless whole.

And perhaps growing older is discovering that life makes considerably more sense once we stop insisting that it make sense.