Ageing and melancholy

Yesterday, I ended my post with a video of the young Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) singing Father and Son.

Various things have conspired over the last few days to remind me of my younger self, and watching that video was a powerful experience.

Mostly I’m OK with the ageing process, I see it as an adventure. Yes, one kind of beauty is fading fast, and I’ve had one or two health problems. But I’ve largely experienced menopause as positive and creative. It’s amazing the way my body heats up as if to burn off the old life in waves, making way for the next phase. The possibility of illness apart, I’m looking forward to this next time in my life.

And yet the last few days I’ve felt really melancholy. I’ve wondered what I’ve actually made of my life. Too much time spent on doing and not nearly enough on being, but the doing has been utterly meaningless. Chasing a career that does no good to anyone, spending long hours in various offices.

On Saturday I dropped my nephew off to meet his friends at a small local music festival by the canal. The sun was out, and as we drove up, his “tribe” came strolling towards us over the grass: a dozen young men and women in their late teens. I’ve watched those guys grow up over the last ten years and now they hover ever so coolly on the edge of adulthood. Girls now affect much the look we did in the late 60s with their long straight hair and pale lips. They seemed to be channelling my own youth, and as I watched them I had to hide my tears.

Where did they go, all those years? Why did I waste all that time not really engaging in life? Why did I always look forward to what would happen in the future instead of living in the now? Why am I still holding back?

And it’s a sobering thing, knowing for certain that one is closer to death than to birth.

Watching Cat Stevens sing with such energy and verve it was as if those intervening years had disappeared and I felt simultaneously really young and really old. Now Yusuf Islam has taken up his musical career again (and thank goodness he has felt able to do so) he is producing some wonderful new work, but like me he will never recapture that golden glow of youth. That feeling that one is untouchable. And unlike me he hasn’t wasted the intervening years sitting in an office. He has made a real difference in people’s lives.

I felt a really urgent call yesterday to stop putting my life on hold. So the puzzle for me now is how to really engage in these last years of my life, however many they may be, without grabbing greedily at experience. To balance the inner and the outer.

And to acknowledge the sadness and regret then let it go.