“You don’t realize the beauty of it then…when I was twenty, I thought I was going to die when I became thirty. I became thirty, and unsurprisingly I was alive. When I became forty, I realized being thirty was really beautiful then. I became fifty and sadly I was the same. When I was seventy, I’d look back to when I was sixty and think how beautiful it was. In front of death, every past moment is the climax of your life. All ages are like a flower – you just don’t know its beauty then.”

“While life and luck can bestow many gifts — money, good looks, love, power — longevity is one that people seems least reluctant to brag about — as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and luck.”

Competitive consumerism: self-explanatory lifestyles of Boomers and Yuppies alike.  

Competitive longevity: not just how long you live but also how you die.

Competitive cognition: the winners die with more marbles.

When I’m Fifty-Five

Cycling on my elliptical, 

“Song-writing” came on TV 

Loving lyrics atypical, 

I wondered what my song would be 

Funny feeling this fifty-five,

Mystical, myth or mystery

Coming attraction in my life,

God please once more deliver me

Normal to have self-reflection,

My time has come and gone so fast   

Who knows when in God’s election,

I too will come to pass as “past?”

A time to live not yet to die,

I want to plant and build some more

Yet closer to the end I sigh, 

What still for me has God in store? 

Forgetting lots and lots to forget,

Price or prize of cognitive decline

Of praises and unspoken regrets,

I ponder in my Auld Lang Syne

Forget the past and press ahead,

Toward the prize Jesus beckons

The source and end by Spirit led,

On faith in Christ my life reckons

My wedding anniversary,

Silver sterling arrives upon  

Memories in my treasury,

Of golden moments to carry on

Cats in the Cradle, “Just like me,”

Or should I say I’m like my Dad 

Seeing my kids, myself I see,

In them my good and sadly bad

Doctor, teacher, and missions abroad,

Passion for music, films, and puns 

Have mercy, my Lord and God, 

Take wheat from chaff when I am done

In faith with family and friends,

My life began and continues to be 

If sixty-four my life does end,

May the same song I sing to thee

 

Both my father and grandfather died at age sixty-four, a fact that resides as a haunting shadow and signpost in my subconscious as my own wheel of life rolls forward. Now at that age when “death stares at you in your face” (Kinsley), I reflect on all the beautiful metaphors for meditation and reflection: a wagon wheel, a gnarled tree, a beautiful flower, or a bouncing ball of life “with ups and downs but eventually lying flat” (Lessness, Lance Olsen).

My self-portrait now continues:

My wheel rolling, more gnarled my tree, 

Begonia* aged sixty-three 

My ball bouncing, though “doing” less,

Thank God my life “be” still to bless

 

In health declined, my mind inclined

To read and write and wisdom find

Thank you, dear friends and family,

This privilege to age with thee

 *From my Chinese name