The Voyage of Life in Daydreaming on the Porch

My life is based on a true story.
Author not known


Seven years into retirement, I find myself looking back on the past more and more often, thinking of my past friends, jobs and careers with increasing emotion, even pathos. I even on occasion admire people I know who are still working in their 70s, but in jobs they love and have always done. Then I come to my senses. I guess it’s what gives them fulfillment.

There is something quite poignant in this final stage of life. I want to find the answers to, or at least explore in much more depth, the big questions of life that I never had time to contemplate at length when I was moving constantly, going from one job to another, being out of work often and anxiously looking for a job, and finally, entering and settling into my final career. When you’re fixated on these things and trying to make a living, and caregiving for ten years, it’s hard to make time to ponder the mysteries of existence, the universe and consciousness. Can you even imagine people with kids today, trying to keep family life together, having any time to read and think deeply? Seems inconceivable to me. But for the past two years I have been doing just that, and it’s been mind-boggling. I feel I am often on the cusp of a big discovery. I seem to be getting closer to the kind of deep understanding I’m looking for.

Back about ten years ago when I was working full time and caring for my mother, I often sat out on the porch in my favorite rocking chair, reviewing my life. Pleasant memories from childhood would pop up out of nowhere, recollections from school and college so long ago, my work on various small newspapers, teaching and being a librarian for many years, also, unavoidably, flashbacks from traumatic events in the past. This often revolved around 10-year periods, the epochs or decades in my life, so to speak.

Memories of the 20 years I spent at the library job I retired from hardly ever cross my mind, strangely enough. They are there, but essentially forgotten. This puzzles me a great deal. I think it is partly because for the first time I had a job that I was perfectly suited for, and in which there was very little stress in comparison to all my previous jobs. However, lately for some reason, a number of my former co-workers have featured prominently in many of my dreams, including last night. I have been trying unsuccessfully for a number of years to consolidate, make sense of, and interpret my memories and some of the dreams I remember for any length of time. To me dreams are one of the great mysteries of life. It will require much more effort than I am currently expending to become more enlightened about these strange phenomena..

My first years of retirement from 2017 through January 2020 when my mother passed away, involved very intensive caregiving, and required a high degree of vigilance, patience and persistence. How many times did I say to myself, “I can’t take much more of this?” And then I’d have unbearable thoughts or visions of her languishing in a nursing home or other facility. Mom was always grateful for all I did for her and was aware of what I did most of the time. She knew who I was most of the time. This is in contrast to what some adult children who are caregivers have to suffer through: parents who curse and berate them, don’t recognize them, and have undergone drastic personality changes for the worse. Mom had some really bad moments, but I could handle them. When it’s your mother you get superhuman strength and resolve.

I like to think of my life now and in the past as the great 19th century landscape painter Thomas Cole did. His most famous work was “The Voyage of Life,” consisting of four enormous paintings titled “Childhood,” “Youth,” “Manhood,” and “Old Age.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_Life). If you look at these allegorical paintings, you can see how the concluding painting, “ Old Age,” offers me a sense of hope, after a life containing much trauma, failure and depression.

I’ve had an inordinate amount of time to think about life and the events and people in my past. Some might think too much time. One thing the solitary life has allowed me has been a very deep and satisfying awareness of, and sensitivity to, Nature, and a capacity to peer deeply into the “ordinary” aspects, things and objects in our lives. The commonplace is not so ordinary or usual to me. This is revealed in my continuing passion for photography. I have my phone camera with me everywhere and all the time because this is the new world of photography and seeing.

The first 20 years of life were the actual and literal formative years of childhood and youth, and the early adult years of college. I find myself now at 73 thinking more often about those particular years of my youth, partly because they seem so far in the distance now that I don’t want to lose those memories. But they are dimming. That’s why I have a lot of memory prompts to help me: actual paperback books I read back in the 1960s in high school; folders of school English papers and copies of graded Algebra and geometry tests, and awards, certificates and report cards from grade school. Boxes and boxes of memorabilia. They are the hidden away vestiges of my past, the tangible artifacts that enable me to recall very specific events and times in my past. Also, and crucially important, I have a black ledger book with lined paper which became the first handwritten journal or diary of any kind that I kept in college from age 19 to 22. That is one of the most priceless and revealing pieces of memorabilia or personal history from my past. Thank goodness I safeguarded it over the decades since. When I dip into it and read entries, the experience is always by turns enlightening, sad, depressing, engrossing and unfathomable, and yet endlessly fascinating. It’s like going back and opening a time capsule. I feel like I’m almost literally back in my youth when I read that journal.

I kept a similar handwritten journal from 1979-1983 when I was teaching English and history, another of my brief careers. That journal is essentially an account of my spiritual journey and progress during those very special and contented years. That space of time was completely unique in almost every sense. There has been nothing like it before or since. The journal contains observations about teaching and my students, and also reflections on my reading, devotions and faith journey. I experienced the rare gift of proximity to inner peace. I could never be that person again. I have changed too much, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. Now, looking back, 1979-1983 was the critical stage of my pilgrimage. I accept that I no longer that person, and yet paradoxically, I am that same person only older, wiser, more complex with the passage of years and interaction with countless people. I think I feel, or perhaps want to feel, like the man in that Thomas Cole painting from his “Voyage of Life” series titled, “Old Age.” I was still a young man in the early 1980s. Now I am old. That makes a huge difference in how I perceive myself. Four decades of living are in the past since those pivotal early years. The turbulent rapids of the river of life are gone and the waters are calm. The angel is now beckoning the man in his boat from the opening of a large shaft of light coming out of parted, dark storm clouds.

The years from age 22 to 42 were what I think of as my formative years, as opposed to childhood and adolescence. The decade when I was in my 20s I consider the “golden” decade, a period of time when life literally and figuratively opened up after a rather lonely childhood and adolescence, particularly my teenage years. I spent a lot of time back then reading, collecting stamps, mowing lawns in the summer and enjoying, for a brief couple of years, hanging out with two friends of my younger brother, two years behind me in high school. I’ll always remember them and the good times together that we enjoyed because I had no friends my own age. In contrast, my 20s appear now like some time-lapse film in which a flower quickly emerges and flourishes from a stem then it folds up and is gone.

I struggled mightily during my 30s with one challenging and terrible hurdle after another. There was no end to it. Solo road trips around the country are what saved me from depression and despair because nothing other than that worked out. Up until my mid 40s, I continued struggling to find my place in the world. I was drifting rather perilously. In my 20s I had the closest friends I would ever get to know. I had a deep friendship whose intensity and significance I was not even fully cognizant of until it gradually withered away. I had three different careers that blossomed and ended in that period of ten years. By my late 20s I had been to near the bottom of the pit, but found my way back out in a miraculous Spring of rebirth and recovery. Memories from that time are the most potent and long-lasting. I was filled with the most profound religious and spiritual insights I had ever known. Those were the years I documented in that early handwritten journal I mentioned earlier. Before that time (1979-83) I had been quite cut off from religion and spirituality. I lived life as if they really didn’t matter. During the brief years of religious awakening, I experienced some of the most fulfilling years of my life when I was teaching. The “golden years” from 22-27 were also good years, but it was a very different sort of happiness and fulfillment, the kind that comes from making your way in the world for the first time. In so many ways it was a totally unique and exhilarating time. I couldn’t get enough of life.

Finally, during most of the last third of my life I have kept an online journal, first my own home page, and then for many years up until the present, an online journal where I found and have treasured a community of other. All those online entries over a span of 25 years were, and are, the most sustained writing I have ever done, and tell my life story more completely than anything else I could have written. A lot has been left out, and I’m torn with regret one minute and in the next, satisfied that I wrote what I could and left out the rest, even if it was a major part of who I was and am. I will let matters stand with that, but will say that what I have not shared in all those years of writing is as revealing, or more so than what I have chosen to write about. Secret diaries in the past were more personally forthcoming. A diarist “spilled the beans,” so to speak, with the knowledge that he or she would be dead and gone before anyone read it, if it wasn’t inadvertently tossed out with the departed one’s other personal belongings. Discarded and lost to future family historians or genealogists.

Today I am writing and posting about the last stage of life. It’s almost surreal to say that because sometimes I feel like I’ll live forever. I don’t feel old mentally and emotionally, and most of the time, not physically. When I feel pretty good, aging is a distant tower. When I feel bad or am depressed, aging and dying hurtle toward me like a cavalry in the near distance.

I am not sure I could bear thinking about the advancement of age and the physical process of dying, which has so greatly speeded up since I turned 70, unless I could write about it. In these twilight and sunset years of life, there is so much to look back on, and so many memories to enlighten me about how I have lived, and, more importantly, how in the future I might want to live and die. Life truly is a voyage.