Welcome to the Brink of Everything
Many of you may know of Parker Palmer, perhaps even his wonderful essay, “Welcome to the Brink of Everything,” which he wrote in June 2018 at the age of 80. An educator and activist, Palmer has published a wealth of books, essays, and poems focused on community, spirituality, and social change. He is currently founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage and Renewal, accumulating national awards and thirteen honorary doctorates along the way.
In a week where one lifetime friend spoke of increasing memory loss and another welcomed her first grandchild, I found myself reading again Palmer’s sober but hopeful essay, which I’d filed away in a folder titled “Keepers” four years ago.
Palmer’s words about embracing gravity, grace, and growing old seem more important than ever. This essay, which appeared in journalist Krista Tippet’s On Being Studio, coincided with the publication of Palmer’s thirteenth book, On the Brink of Everything.
Every day, I get closer to the brink of everything. We’re all headed that way, of course, even when we’re young, though most of us are too busy with Important Matters to ponder our mortality. But when a serious illness or accident strikes, or someone dear to us dies — or we go to a class reunion and wonder who all those old people are — it becomes harder to ignore the drop-off that lies just over the edge of our lives.
Age brings diminishments, but more than a few come with benefits. I’ve lost the capacity for multitasking, but I’ve rediscovered the joy of doing one thing at a time. My thinking has slowed a bit, but experience has made it deeper and richer. I’m done with big and complex projects, but more aware of the loveliness of simple things: a talk with a friend, a walk in the woods, sunsets and sunrises, a night of good sleep.
I have fears, of course, always have and always will. But as time lengthens like a shadow behind me, and the time ahead dwindles, my overriding feeling is gratitude for the gift of life.
Above all, I like being old because the view from the brink is striking, a full panorama of my life — and a bracing breeze awakens me to new ways of understanding my own past, present, and future. As one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters says in Player Piano, “out on the edge you can see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
Looking back, I see why I needed the tedium and the inspiration, the anger and the love, the anguish and the joy. I see how it all belongs, even those days of despair when the darkness overwhelmed me. Calamities I once lamented now appear as strong threads of a larger weave, without which the fabric of my life would be less resilient. Moments of fulfillment I failed to relish in my impatience to get on to the next thing now appear as times to be recalled and savored. And I’ve doubled down on my gratitude for those who’ve helped me along with love, affirmation, hard questions, daunting challenges, compassion, and forgiveness.
Looking around at our shared world, its suffering and its promise, I see the courage with which so many live in service of the human possibility. Old age is no time to hunker down, unless disability demands it. Old is just another word for nothing left to lose, a time of life to take bigger risks on behalf of the common good.
Looking ahead to the day when I go over the brink to what Leonard Cohen calls our “invincible defeat,” all I know for sure is that it’s a long way down. Will I spread my wings and fly, fall wordless as a rock, or flame out like a screaming banshee? I have no idea.
But of this I am certain: that I’ve come this far makes me one of the lucky ones. Many people never had a chance to see the view from where I stand, and I might well have been among them. I’ve known days when the voice of depression told me that death was a better idea than trying to carry on. For a long time, I bored my doctors, but over the past fifteen years, I’ve become a “person of interest” to several kinds of specialists.
So I’m not given to waxing romantic about aging and dying. I simply know that the first is a privilege and the second is not up for negotiation.
In 2004, shortly after my 65th birthday, I spent an evening with friends who gave me a hard time about my generation’s motto, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Amid jibes like “You’ve exceeded your shelf life by more than twice,” someone asked, “Seriously, how do you feel about getting old?”
“I’ll let you know when I get there,” I said. “But I can tell you this. The Dylan Thomas poem I loved when I was young — ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ — no longer speaks to me.”
It was a late summer evening, and we had a lovely view to the west. “Look at that sunset,” I went on. “It’s beautiful, and it keeps getting more beautiful before things go dark. If that sun began to rise right now, we’d be shrieking, Apocalypse!, knowing that our solar system had gone bonkers, that the laws of nature had failed.
“I don’t want to fight the gravity of aging. It’s nature’s way. I want to collaborate with it as best I can, in hopes of going down with something like the grace of that setting sun. For all the wrinkles and worry lines, it’s a lovely thing simply to be one of those who’s lived long enough to say, ‘I’m getting old.’”
Today, I smile at the notion of “collaborating with aging.” It reminds me of the exchange between the nineteenth-century transcendentalist Margaret Fuller and the writer Thomas Carlyle. “I accept the universe,” proclaimed Fuller. “Gad! She’d better,” replied Carlyle. I’m with her in this little spat, though I do admire his wit.
We have no choice about death. But we do have choices to make about how we hold the inevitable — choices made difficult by a culture that celebrates youth, disparages old age, and discourages us from facing into our mortality. The laws of nature that dictate the sunset dictate our demise. But how we travel the arc between our own sunrise and sundown is ours to choose: Will it be denial, defiance, or collaboration?
For many years, writing has been one of my ways of collaborating with life. For me, writing is not about filling my head with ideas, then downloading them to the page. That’s not writing; it’s typing. Writing is an unfolding of what’s going on inside me as I talk to myself on a pad of paper or a computer, a version of talk therapy that requires neither an appointment nor a fee. This book, my tenth, is one fruit of my collaboration with aging — an offering from a fellow traveler to those who share this road, pondering as they go.
A few words about “grace, gravity, and getting old.” I’m writing this prelude in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For over a decade, my wife and I have come here in the late spring for a couple of weeks of hiking, writing, napping, eating Southwestern food, and enjoying spectacular sunsets.
At my age, the napping, eating, and sky-gazing are no stretch. But out on a mountain trail, I feel both grace and gravity more keenly than when I first came here in my mid-60s.
The grace is that I have the health and resources to get myself out to the high desert; that, after a couple of days, my heart and lungs are still able to adjust to the 7,000-foot difference between Santa Fe and my midwestern home; that I can stand at a trailhead and still feel confident about getting partway up, maybe even to the top of a trail that climbs from 9,000 to 10,000 feet; that every foot of the way I’m surrounded by beauty that a lot of people never get a chance to see.
But as I climb, gravity kicks in. I hike more slowly than I used to, stopping to catch my breath more often. I have to be more attentive to where I’m putting my feet lest a momentary imbalance pitch me into a fall. The tug of gravity is an inescapable part of aging. As they say, “Everything goes south.” Energy, reaction time, muscle tone, the body itself — they’re all headed back into the earth, as far south as it goes.
There’s no antidote for the gravity that takes us to the grave. But there is a countervailing force called “levity.” According to an online etymological dictionary, “In [the] old science (16th–17th Century), [levity is] the name of a force or property of physical bodies, the opposite of gravity, causing them to tend to rise.” For us, of course, levity means the kind of humor that eases the burden of life’s gravitas, the kind G. K. Chesterton had in mind when he said, “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
As Leonard Cohen writes in one of his many memorable verses, “Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey / I ache in the places where I used to play.” It’s all true, and the first few words are heavy. But the laugh that comes with the second line lightens the load.
Poetry also lightens the load by lifting weighty things using the leverage of metaphor. Here’s an example from the poet Jeanne Lohmann, who wrote with insight and elegance until her death at age ninety-three. Her poem helps me deal with the sense of heaviness about aging that occasionally comes over me. It also helped inspire me to write this book — a meditation on aging in which I’ve tried to be true to gravity, to grace, and to the voice of my own experience in a way that invites the reader to listen to his or hers:
Invocation
by Jeanne Lohmann
Let us try what it is to be true to gravity,
to grace, to the given, faithful to our own voices,
to lines making the map of our furrowed tongue …
(Excerpted from Shaking the Tree: New and Selected Poems. Read the full poem here.)
I hope that the words on these pages refuse “solemnity and slogans” and “honor what hides and does not come easy to speech.” My words are no more than “feathers that fly,” but that does not matter. What matters is that they fly “in a holy direction,” the direction of life.
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