The flowers, a cluster about the size of his hand, had sprung up near
the woodpile, stopping him and the lawn mower in their tracks. A
delicate blue, a shade darker than a robin’s egg, the blossoms had four
petals, each no longer than a baby’s fingernail. A squadron of polished
sentries, they proudly saluted the sky as they stretched above the short
grass for the warmth of the spring sun. A few years ago, he probably
wouldn’t even have noticed them and mowed them down. Today, they
invited—commanded—close inspection. Plus, he didn’t want their beheading
on his conscience. Everything is connected, he had been thinking lately.
They were interlopers—after 30-odd years of molding his 6 acres of
Catskill hardscrabble with scythes, brush hogs, hoes, and chain saws, he
knew the location of every perennial plant and when it would appear:
The deer-resistant daffodils poked up during the third week of May, you
could find wild strawberries on the southern edge of the lawn the second
week of June, the lilies bloomed in July, the bee balm in August. These
pale beauties hadn’t been here last year. What fair, fertile wind had
deposited their seed on his lawn?
He picked a bunch and brought them to his wife, who he knew would be delighted, her appreciation of natura naturans
quite a bit more evolved than his. She held one up as she searched for
its name in a field guide, the flower’s neon-green stem curving ever so
gracefully, like the long, beautiful neck of an aristocratic Parisienne
in a Modigliani painting. “They’re called bluets,” she announced,
setting the flowers in a vase. “Tiny but perfect.”
He flashed on
another time she’d used that phrase—about 20 years before when the last
of their children, the twins, were born. Exhausted but blissed out, she
lay on the hospital bed with him as they admired their creations, now
dozing peacefully between them in their little blue and pink caps. She
prised a finger into each baby’s fist and they instinctively tightened
their grasp. “Tiny but perfect,” she’d declared.
He missed the kids, now far away at college—missed playing hockey
with his son, squash and music with his daughter. But after more than 30
years of having children in the house, he and his wife were eager to
inhabit their emptied nest. They could order takeout and a movie for
dinner without being accused (by the junior cultural snobs) of
philistinism, travel when they wanted. They no longer needed to close
their bedroom door. Just like before, preprogeny, they loomed large in
each other’s eyes—and they still craved what they saw.
Years ago, a famous psychiatrist he was interviewing remarked, “Wait
until your 60s. Then things really open up.” It seemed preposterous at
the time. In your 60s? When you’re old and shrinking? But now,
though still a few years shy of that mark (and decidedly not old), he
had begun to understand what the esteemed doctor meant. Decades-long
preoccupations—professional achievement, social status, money, gaily
duty—were beginning to loosen their grip. His focus was becoming less
goal-oriented, softer, more flexible—expansive enough to marvel at the
richness of an ever-deepening lifelong partnership, keen enough to
witness exquisite discoveries, like bluets. It was as though an
existential gene had switched on.
The journalist in him knew that the blossoming of his “spiritual”
side, for lack of a better term, was a well-documented phenomenon of
midlife. In his eight-stage model of lifelong development, the great
psychiatrist Erik Erikson observed that the primary preoccupation of
middle adulthood is, or should be, creative and meaningful pursuits that
benefit not just the self but also the next generation. More recently,
in their studies of “socioemotional selectivity,” Stanford psychologists
documented the profound shift in focus that occurs in middle age. In
youth, when you have more time in front of you than behind you, you’re
strongly motivated to acquire new information, skills, and experiences
because your sights are firmly trained in the future. Later, when your
future is not so open-ended, you’re more attracted to the familiar and
to pursuits that will yield emotional gratification. You concentrate on
“sure things,” and absorb and savor the good ones before you, right now.
There are several reasons older people report being more content than
younger people, but this focus on the present moment may be the most
important.
Still, he was surprised by his attitudinal shape-shift. His exposure
to organized religion had been spotty at best, and his latent cynicism
had caused him to suspect the New Age pursuit of “self-actualization”
was just more boomer narcissism. As certain older friends preceded him
down this path, he questioned their sanity. They were going back to the
churches they hated as kids, throwing over lucrative careers for
volunteer jobs in Africa, dispossessing themselves of a lifetime’s worth
of stuff, hoping purity and enlightenment would fill the void.
On the final leg of their vision quest, would they migrate en masse to
Sedona so they could sit all day in lotus position and groove to the
music of the spheres?
But then he had an “experience.” On a reporting trip to Israel, after
tucking the obligatory slip of paper bearing the names of his loved
ones into a crack in the wall of the ancient holy shrine, he sat for a
few minutes near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Magically, as if
recorded on an inner tape, his entire life scrolled before his eyes—a
fast-forward presentation of every achievement and victory, humiliation
and defeat, every lost friend and found lover, every birth and death. He
sat very still, eyes wide, fixing on the middle distance, dumbfounded
as the images crossed the back of his eyes, telling himself, Just stay with this. When it was over, the thing that struck him was that no event in his life was more significant than any other. They all just were. He felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, completely at peace.
Since he realized that everything is okay, he’d developed an
affection for certain aphorisms he’d once consigned to his flaky-phrase
book: There are no coincidences. Everything is connected. They
had an acceptably secular tone, part particle physics (you can’t move an
electron here without a corresponding response somewhere else), part
wisdom of the ages: Stop and look or you’ll miss the miracle. All you have to do is pay close attention.
Now, deep into autumn, the woods stripped bare and the grass matted
and sere, no sign exists that the bluets had ever graced his lawn. Would
they show up again next year? He consulted the field guide, where, on
the page that detailed their unique taxonomy, his wife had thoughtfully
pressed a single bluet. He removed it and closed the book. That was then, this is now.
He held it up to the light, admiring the graceful curve of its stem,
and showed it to her. She nodded, smiled, and went back to her work at
her desk, pulling her hair back with both hands and knotting it at the
back with a pencil, exposing her elegant neck. It, too, arched
gracefully, like that of a beautiful woman in a Modigliani painting.