“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
I know I've led with that quote before, but it seems to fit the moment. There's been a certain unease to life these days, rudderless and suddenly not so sure-footed as I come up on sixty and gaze at the paunchy, bald guy with the scruffy beard looking back at me in the bathroom mirror. Not impressive, Donk. Not at all.
And all of these gathering infirmities! Peg refers to me in public as her marathon runner husband, and I wince a little. My last marathon was in 2007, nearly seventeen years ago. I'm also not her fighter pilot husband. My fini flight was on August 5, 1994. Professor husband? Not since Memorial Day weekend, 2010, when I said goodbye to all that to make my household happy. Priest husband? Let's not go there, shall we? Trial lawyer husband? Somewhat closer to the mark, but trials are as rare as hens' teeth, and whatever I was, striding the courtroom and talking to juries about dead children or a treacherous business partner or some other scenario of abject human misery, I'm not these days. Leave that stuff to the young bucks.
Which sort of begs the question: what or who am I exactly, if not any of those things?
The last few days have drawn back the curtain a bit as I've tried to navigate all of this. That's how discernment works, in my narrow experience. There aren't many road to Damascus moments; things just sort of reveal themselves through experience, viewed with the proper lens.
I'll start by noting, as any observer might, that every "who I am" on that list above, maybe except running to excess, involved a job, a role I played in a past life. The risk of defining oneself as a vocation is that the vocation may not pass entirely, but it certainly transforms, maybe shrinks a bit as I shrink and lose that testosterone-driven ambition to some Next Big Thing in the profession of the moment.
But, again, work changes, and no one is calling and expecting me to go try a case for them. I'm simply too expensive, and at some level this has been one of the sources of my discomfit these days. I once excelled (just ask me!) at picking apart a legal argument, engaging judges in dialogue about some esoteric distinction in a body of caselaw or set of facts that provided the margin between error and arriving at the right conclusion. I took a mean deposition, and could pound a witness who needed pounding in front of an entertained jury.
So what happened? As soon as I reached the top of my game, I was priced out of it. I'm rarely in court on anything substantive, rarely get the intellectual delight of sitting with a pile of printed cases and scribbled notes and distilling a written argument that seems to arise out of nowhere, as if there's some Law Muse sitting with me at the desk. Those sorts of projects require large blocks of time, and at nearly $500.00 an hour very few people are willing or able to pay for all that. Now, instead, I'm more of a litigation manager, leaving it to other less experienced and pricey lawyers to do the actual work while I monitor files and suggest what needs to happen to move a case toward conclusion. And I talk on the phone and respond to emails and texts, almost constantly. Most days, combined, I'm looking at maybe two hundred such communications by quitting time (and sometimes beyond, unfortunately). No time for deep thought when you're speed dating. It's no fun at all.
It took me weeks, maybe months, of this professional gloom to realize what was happening. This bit of discernment is progress, in that now that I've identified the problem maybe I can start working on fixing it. Peg said days ago that she'd observed I might be happier providing basically a concierge service to a handful of clients, and mediating more of course, rather than trying to ride herd on dozens of files and spend hours a day dealing with emotionally fraught clients and an increasingly nasty professional community. I think she's on to something there. Maybe there's a chance to return to what I always did best, which was never pastoral care or suffering fools lightly.
The leaf blowers outside have begun again. Usually they wait until a hearing is about to start, so I can watch the expression of the judge on the Zoom screen curl into one of disdain at the constant roar in the background. I've learned to really dislike the late fall here, with endless piles of leaf detritus and the constant whine of these leaf blowers. When did we choose to abandon rakes?
I sound like an old man, and in fact I am in a lot of ways. I always feel like I need to condition that observation, as a reader far older may roll his or her eyes at the notion that this is "old". Well, it sure as hell isn't middle age anymore. P and I both struggle with the fact that we're not what we were in our prime; the hard part in all of this, and the only way to go into it gracefully is to accept where we are, what we can and can't do these days, and find the sweetness in this life that comes with recognizing its finitude. Which requires a great deal of trust in the other person. Rounding the curve on five years of marriage, it feels like we've arrived in that place.
On this point of making peace with our age, Anne Lamott's essay a few days ago in the WaPo, reprinted here, captures this moment as she recalls the revelation of sixty as she looks back from seventy:
And in my reading this morning that has nothing to do with current events or the law, something I've tried to reincorporate as a devotional of sorts, I ran across a passage from Ovid that's been captured in centuries of art. Baucis and Philemon were an elderly couple in Phrygia, part of present day Turkey. One day their humble abode was visited by Jupiter and Mercury, disguised as mortal humans and apparently slumming around for a few days. They'd not been afforded much hospitality in this particular neighborhood, when they came upon the home of Baucis and Philemon, who heaped them with what simple fare the two had available, washed their feet, and otherwise treated them like family.
The two gods were taken with the kindness of the old couple, and after revealing themselves as immortals asked their hosts what wish the gods might grant. The couple asked that they be allowed to guard a temple to Jupiter and Mercury in their hometown, but not as humans who would see one another decay and die, but as trees grown together from two trunks.
This stanza touched me, Philemon addressing their guests about the couple's deepest fear, as I thought of the season P and I enter together:
Since in concord we have spent our years,
Grant that the selfsame hour may take us both,
That I my consort's tomb may never see,
Nor may it fall to her to bury me.
-Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII, lines 1111-1115.
Watching my stepfather's odd, businesslike response to my mother's demise, and contrasting it with another friend's deep grief at the loss of her high school sweetheart after sixty years of marriage, I can tell you where on that spectrum I see us falling.
Which makes this moment so incredibly precious. We're not what we were, but we're still "walkie talkies", as P sometimes puts it. I can't run a marathon (my hips hurt like hell most cold days, a souvenir of those long runs), but I ran three miles yesterday without much trouble. I'll never fly an Eagle again, but I can fly the Columbia halfway across the country and land in weather that would've given twenty-five-year-old me pause. I may not have the quick mind that carried me so many times in the courtroom, but I'm a lot wiser and humble now (the two seem to travel together), and tend to get better results because I don't have to pretend I'm in a conversation with the judge in the quest for the right answer---that's really what I'm doing, even if it means an imperfect outcome for the person paying me.
A gloomy Thursday, bone-damp chilly with the promise of more of the same during what's left of my time up here.
But at the end of the day P returns home, I come out from behind this desk for my daily embrace, and the best part of life begins again. We have supper guests tomorrow and Saturday--maybe I can talk her into a walk down the hill to let someone else cook tonight?
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