you get serious about how you are going to live

This is an excerpt from a column by Anne Lamott, written for the Washington Post.

      As we look older and somewhat more frail, we have a last chance to coax forth compassion and kindness from the world. As we surrender to the reality that, as we age, most of the systems of body and mind start to go on the fritz, we invite humility into our lives. There is no greater strength.

      I am definitely running out of time, and I have (mostly) made peace with that.

      When I was a child, one of the most important events of the year was the county fair. My friends and I would go on all the carnival rides and eat all the carnival food. But around 10 p.m., someone would notice the time. We’d have only an hour until our parents arrived. Suddenly we had a new clarity of purpose. We stopped wanting to ride the Gravitron or eat more cotton candy. We wanted to get one more funnel cake and then head for the Ferris wheel. This is what aging feels like. You suddenly realize you’ve got one hour left at the fair, and you get serious about how you are going to live.

      Twenty-five years ago, my then-9-year-old son inadvertently helped me see the way: I was racing to an appearance at a theater on the docks of San Francisco Bay, holding a purse, a coffee, a batch of papers and my latest book, and trying to get Sam to hurry up behind me. Suddenly, some pages blew away toward some bored cormorants on the pilings. Sam caught them and then glared at me. “Mom,” he said, “you’re carrying too much, and you’re going too fast.”

      You get away with this manic, burdened way of living for the first two-thirds of life, but as you transition to the third third, you start to wonder whether this pattern argues a wasted life. You slow down. You start to actually be here for your life. What a concept.

      After all the losses, disappointments and deaths that every older person has experienced, we usually discover how life miraculously goes on, reshapes itself toward homeostasis and more grace than we could have imagined. We learn to look beyond our dire imaginings and trust that this miracle might just happen again. I once heard someone say that hope is faith with a track record.