Jim Taylor's Soft Edges - Recycling Myself

Recycling Myself

Wednesday August 30, 2006

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me…
        This Friday, I turn 70, whatever that means. I want to celebrate, but I'm not sure what to celebrate.
        As my father commented about his 90^th birthday, "What's so significant about mere longevity?"
        I'm wondering the same thing.
        If I live as long as he did, how much might I accomplish in the next 20 years? Not much more, I suspect, given my lower energy levels, than I have already done.
        And when I look backwards, I wonder what I have really accomplished. A great deal, in some ways. But in others, I don't see that my efforts have made much lasting difference in a world that often seems dedicated to self-destruction.
        Like the writer of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes – by tradition, King Solomon himself – I'm tempted to mutter, "Futility, all is futility, like chasing after wind…"
        But in the middle of his depressing soliloquy, that writer pens some penetrating philosophy. "To everything," he says, "there is a season…"
        My birthday, I note, comes at the turning of the season from summer to autumn.
        Pete Seeger adapted those verses from Ecclesiastes for the folk song “Turn, turn, turn.” I paraphrased them for the book by Lois Huey-Heck and Jim Kalnin, The Spirituality of Art (Wood Lake Books, 2006). They seem appropriate to the day:

The pendulum swings, and swings back.
For every action, there will be an equal and opposite reaction.
So we are born, and eventually we die.
We plant seeds in the spring, and rip out the roots in the fall.
Killing and healing tread on each other's heels.
Buildings go up and get torn down, and new buildings emerge from the ruins of the old.
The Phoenix rises from its own ashes.
You lose someone you love, and in grief you bounce between tears and hysterical laughter. If despair were forever, you couldn't carry on, but you carry on because you know that despair will someday be displaced by dancing again.
You can't make love all the time. Sooner or later, you have to become friends.
You misplace your house keys; you find them. You forget someone's name; it comes back to you in the middle of the night. You lose a job, and a new career opens up.
You spend the first half of your life accumulating possessions, and the second half giving them away.
The animated conversations of young lovers mature into the comfortable silences of long familiarity.
Why should we expect a single state of mind, a single snapshot of experience, to last indefinitely? Does a pendulum stop at the end of its swing? So war and peace, love and hate, togetherness and aloneness, inevitably cycle and recycle.
This is how God teaches us. Life is full of resurrections.