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In a memorable joke, a snail slips into a bank, robs it, then slips out the door and slides down the sidewalk to freedom. A few minutes later, police arrived and questioned the witness, the next turtle in line at the teller, and asked the languid leatherback what he had seen. “I don’t know,” replied the soft-shelled turtle indignantly. “Everything happened so quickly.”
The larger truth of this joke is universal, and is that perspective matters, not just in terms of speed but also in terms of time. I know this because, day by day, I’m like that confused turtle in the bank, looking at the events happening around me and thinking about them differently than I used to. Because I feel that way. This is what I mean.
I don’t like wearing night vision goggles just to read the dinner menu in a dimly lit restaurant. I don’t like icing my knees after a long run like Willis Reed did after Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals. The harsh, unforgiving truth about my own mortality: Father Time is undefeated is an unpleasant reminder.
Increased rotation of the Sun creates a feeling that you need to forgive the mistakes you have made. (Stefan Tomic/iStock)
But for all its pain and humiliation, aging is not without its blessings. I started noticing this three years ago when the odometer showed 50 years of time on the ground. Suddenly I started thinking in terms of the half-century I had just arrived at. This habit of reflection encouraged a certain humility within me.
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Fifty years of my life passed as quickly as a snap of a finger. That was so, even though it took what felt like an eternity for my 16th and 21st birthdays and my prepubescent Christmas to arrive. Looking back now, all these distant moments seem like they happened just yesterday.
Having lived half a century, I now know that the period was not as vast as I had previously believed. Fifty years before I was born, in 1921, Charlie Chaplin was active in America, the Republic of Ireland gained independence, and Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany’s Nazi Party.
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As I once refreshingly surmised, we can no longer dismiss those distant events in times so different from our own as a lifetime ago. now they my A lifetime ago, I mean, it’s never that far away. This made me wonder what life would be like for the next 50 years until 1921, the only 50 years that were available to me at the time.
1871 was the era of American Reconstruction, just six years after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. I suspect that when people twice my age participate in this mental time travel, especially in the United States, which is still a young country, the results will be twice as humbling.
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As British literary scholars C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield so well put it, aging turns out to be a great tonic against chronological snobbery, the notion that the past is inherently inferior to the present. . The older we get, the more we live in both worlds: past and present. The more I judge the past, the more I realize that I am only judging myself.
Increased rotation of the Sun creates a feeling that you need to forgive the mistakes you have made. British polymath G.K. Chesterton, in his essay “Of Household Gods and Goblins,” wrote, “Children are innocent and love justice, whereas most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.” It says that. Chesterton was right. I rarely cry out for justice anymore, only for tender mercy.
There is joy in growing old. I am grateful for the habit of humility that years of accumulation have given me. As our temporal perspective changes, we are reminded that humans may change, but human nature does not.
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Our ancestors made different mistakes than we do, some more serious than others. The same is true for our descendants. But without the help of God’s grace, we humans have done and will continue to do in a fallen world until the end.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux was once asked what his three most important virtues were. His answer – humble, humble, humble – is a great one, and an important lesson that aging teaches us over and over again, if we allow it.
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