I’ve been thinking about turning 80 years old.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been thinking about turning 80 years old, which happens for me on June 17th.
Let me begin with a reality check.
Eighty is the new 80. I can’t lie to myself about my age, nor buy into the frivolous notion that 80 is just a number and somehow the years have not taken their toll on me. I know that more and more of us are living well into our eighties, nineties, and beyond. I’m thankful to be on the cusp of joining this motley crew.
But I also know that my brain and heart and liver are 80 years old. I have 80-year-old lungs and, what is increasingly obvious, an 80-year-old memory. However robust I might feel, I am 80 years old.
The reason 80 is difficult to own up to is not just that it means I’m old (which it does) but that it means I’m certainly nearing the end of my life. In my extended family only one uncle has lived past 84. That's the age my mother was when she died and it's the horizon that has loomed for me since losing her twenty-five years ago. This horizon now approaches with alarming speed. Maybe I’ll live longer than she; maybe not. However long I live, the end of my life is nearer now than the middle of it.
I'm not afraid of death. On the other hand, I have held too many aging hands through their final long-suffering, so I hope like hell I escape an extended season of painful dying. I know such hope is a crap-shoot: disease and accident come randomly, not according to some calendar we can influence or count on. I just hope I miss out on some battle with extended misery. I’m ambivalent about an after-life; if it occurs, I’ll exult in the wonderful surprise, but if my death is the end of me I suppose I won’t notice it a bit.
I’m grateful to be healthy; but still, 80 is the new 80.
Looking back through these too-many decades, I find myself wondering what I’ve learned. Lots, of course: most of it somewhere between trivial and interesting, bits and pieces of it valuable, and a few things that seem worth passing on.
* * *
Character counts.The intellectual and moral qualities we stitch together over a lifetime define us: what we think about and what we care about; what we’re committed to and what we disdain; how we behave and how we misbehave according to what constitutes our moral core. These become our distinct individual character.
What it took me perhaps too long to learn is that character is a work in progress. We give it new shape with every decision we make, especially those watershed moments on the other side of which nothing is ever the same: the woman I’m married to, the way I blew up a career and created a new one, the death of our younger son, confronting my first bout with cancer. The most promising character can be mauled and deformed by one corrupting decision, just as a questionable character can exalt itself with one act of courage or one moment of integrity under pressure.
Brian Stevenson, whose work with the falsely incarcerated is the subject of the book and film Just Mercy, reminds us that each person in our society is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. It seems to me equally true that each of us is probably less than the best thing we’ve ever done. Each of us is this mix of muck and glory that is the common human condition.
Character is not carved in marble. It is moist clay, constantly reshaped as we make our way through however many decades we’re allowed.
* * *
Work defines us in many ways. I think of my work as what I get up to do every day to contribute to the project of turning the human race into the human family. Raising babies or comforting the elderly, digging in the earth or landing on Mars, commuting to a cubicle or running for office, studying biology or playing basketball – work is whatever we do to play our part.
Both of my parents left high school to go to work in unskilled jobs because they had so little money. They never had the opportunities for training or education that might have lifted them to higher paying careers. I was fortunate to be raised in California when it had the greatest public education system in the world, which I attended from kindergarten through my graduation from UCLA (where I paid something like $25 per semester). In my careers as a pastor and a psychotherapist, I was able to develop two of my greatest skills, an ability to relate to others in an openhearted, open-minded way, and a facility to speak and write fluently.
The great mythologist Joseph Campbell studied cultures around the world and wound up with this simple wisdom to guide our choice of work: Follow Your Bliss. Would that more of us, like my parents, had found our blissful vocation. I’m grateful that I did. Finding something you love that you’re at least pretty good at has a lot to do with how much meaning you get from your work. I hope you get from your work as much soulful gratification as I’ve had from mine.
It’s startling to catalogue the kinds of work people do now that were nonexistent or barely available when I was growing up. My wife is a lawyer, my daughter a physician, both of which would have been unusual before the women’s movement of the 1960s. There was no Silicon Valley, barely an aerospace industry, little international air travel, no gig economy. Today’s work world looks nothing like the one I grew up in; I assume the same will be true, looking back, when my grandchildren are 80 years old and wondering about whatever work their children and grandchildren engage in. The speed of cultural change, and therefore the changes in work environments, accelerates at an alarming pace.
Since most of us get paid for our work, this is the context in which we decide what money means to us. In the decades of my lifetime, I’ve watched (and perhaps participated in) the triumph of money as the major source of meaning in American life. Commitment to family, to religion, to country, to my neighbor, to the common good: these once-dominant values have slipped behind how much money I make and how much stuff I can buy in defining success in America.
I try to keep my own materialistic, consumerist self in check by asking regularly: am I managing my money, or is my money managing me? Not surprisingly, it’s a disappointment that too often my honest answer is, at best, not clear.
* * *
I’m most clearly defined by and most clearly devoted to the people I love who love me. More than anything else in my life, these lovers matter. I remember when I turned 70 (yes, my memory is at least intact about the past decade) that I knew the most important commitment to my future was to spend as much time as possible with my wife, my children and their partners, my grandchildren and a small circle of close friends, what a friend once referred to as my bowling team. I’m grateful for the success I feel in having fulfilled that commitment to myself over the past ten years.
My family and friends anchor me, nurture me and give me the safe place from which to explore new challenges and take chances with fresh ideas and unconventional commitments, even at my advanced age. We keep our loving connections refreshed by speaking honestly, listening carefully, being endlessly curious about each other, and insisting that these conversations happen time and time again because we assign each of them a recurring place on our calendars.
I am full of gratitude for the ways in which these Beloveds continue to show up in my life, and however many days I have left, I want above all else more time with these precious people.
* * *
A final thought on turning 80.
In my mid-thirties, I spent an evening with a group of close friends talking about the premature death of one of our pals, and wondering about our own deaths, perhaps for the first time. Toward the end of the long conversation I surprised myself and my friends by saying, quite soberly, I’m really going to miss me when I die.
Has your narcissism no bounds? one of them responded, fortunately while laughing at my audacity. Others joined her in teasing me and pressing me until I was able to say, quite honestly, that I meant what I said.
I mean it still.
I hold my entire life as a precious gift. I don’t want to leave anything out of the narrative, because I want to own the whole truth of what has been a resonant, captivating life. I have succeeded brilliantly at times and failed miserably at my own hands. I take pride in much of who I am, and feel still the diminishing but touchable bruise of shame. I know what ecstatic pleasure is, and pain beyond the bounds of language to explain it. I want to claim all of this dense mix of muck and glory that is my own personal story.
As I turn 80, I know that whenever I die I’m really going to miss me.
Blessings,
– Rick