LET BE. The Readiness is All

Young men are proud of their strength. Gray hair brings honour to old men. (Proverbs 20:29)

Most old(er) men have lost that edge that would keep you apprehensive, wary of them in the days when we all had something to prove and explosive libidos had to be tamed on the volleyball court, on ski hills or in some vicious and unforgiving raquet ball court. Their solipsistic piss-and-vinegar traded in for one more day without back pain, or shoulder weakness, or urinal-straining. The old(er) man’s Faustian trade-off with the devil.

Mostly, our conversation (us older men, that is) is motivated by surprise, the amazement that we’re walking around in our grandfathers’ slippers, the in-credulocity at the number of candles on the cake, put there—seemingly— while our backs were turned for just a glance or two to watch some lively girls stroll by.

. . . or wondered how the bottom of the glass could show itself so soon, while we were still mightily thirsty.

There’s that. But then there’s the ripeness, the glow beyond the green and before the shriveled. The sweet-spot where despair transforms into a kind of unexpected gelassenheit, rebelliousness gives way to a smoother, creamier submission. Where pronouncements come never, and sometimes—just sometimes—profound gushes of wisdom boil forth like freshets from Solomon’s fountain, surprising oneself as much as astounding everyone else. And listeners’ rapt attention might be admiration as at a winning tennis shot, or a suppressed, “What the hell’s he talking about,” but whether it’s the one or the other amazingly doesn’t matter . . . much.

It can be peaceful, being an old(er) man. You can smile when your children press the do not go gentle into that good night upon you, even while you know that they really mean: “please don’t go into that awful night at all; I won’t have it!” And their pleas are echoes of your own, of those you’ve loved who once upon a time became old men and faced the night: some with courage and some without, some gently and some raspingly.

It’s not your own creaking that rattles your peace anymore, but the plight of the young ones who in their greenness still assume that tight buttocks and thighs can be forever, if one does enough push-ups, avoids red meat.

Old(er) men can read the words of Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It with a smile and without flinching, even if they recognize their own “lean and slippered pantaloon” stage in it and know the “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything” is the Seventh Stage . . . and they’re living the Sixth.

And so—old(er) men out there—burn your skis, your raquets, your books, your tools if necessary. The lean and slippered pantaloon is no bad place to be . . . unless we waste it all away in lamentation.

“We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes?

Let be.” (Hamlet, IV,ii)