2nd Half

The Edge of the Raft 1: Prayer

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The edge of a raft is fun if you are a kid playing with friends on a summer’s day. It’s scary if your ship just sank and you are being tossed by wind and waves.

Shortly after I finished my last blog post, Life pushed me out on to the edge of the raft. All of my plans for writing fell apart as my energy has gone into clinging to the raft. Perhaps the subject of that post was part of the reason.

Another reason was that my denomination decided that the stuff that divides us is more important than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that unites us.

Of course, we did it “prayerfully.” We all prayed for months before the big meeting. The meeting began with a day of prayer and worship.

That kind of praying reminds me of a story that was often told in the first church I served after graduating from seminary:

In the 1920’s, two of the most powerful laymen in the church disagreed about an important issue. The disagreement grew uglier and uglier. Finally, the pastor and other lay leaders prevailed upon the two men to kneel in prayer at the altar rail and to ask God for guidance.

After a few minutes of prayer, one of the men rose to his feet and announced:

“God has answered our prayers. We are going to do it my way.”

This is in contrast to the story we always tell about Jesus on Thursday of Holy Week. After he celebrated Passover with his disciples, he went out into the garden to pray. He knew what was coming. He asked God to somehow let it pass from him the way the Angel of Death once “passed over” the homes of the Israelites.

However, at the end of this prayer he said,

“Nevertheless, not my will, but Your will be done.”

The older I get the less I know about prayer.

But I do believe this:

  • If I get off my knees with the same conviction I had before I prayed, I did not pray.
  • If I am not more open to some other possibility, I did not pray.
  • If I do not love my adversaries, I did not pray.
  • If I do not understand them better, I did not pray.
  • If I do not find it in my heart to forgive, I did not pray.

I haven’t prayed much in my life because I’ve done most of my praying in church or during what people in my tradition like to call our “quiet time.”

  • These prayers ask God to bless the paths we have already chosen.
  • These prayers ask God to change someone else’s mind and heart.
  • These prayers thank God for the ship we are on.
  • These prayers assume that the ship is headed God’s way.

I am learning that the best place to pray is on the edge of the raft.

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It’s Good to Suck at Things 3: When We Suck at Life

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Have I lived a life worth living?
Did I always do my best with what I had?
Have I made peace with everyone I may have hurt or who has hurt me?
If your answer to all three of these questions is “yes,” don’t waste your time reading further.

This is for people who know that we have sucked at life.

A lot of us review our lives as we live into the Third Half of Life. If we are honest with ourselves, we face the fact that one or more (or all ) of the following may be true.
I sucked at being a son or daughter
I sucked at being a brother or sister
I sucked at being a friend
I sucked at being a spouse
I sucked at being a parent
I sucked at my job
I sucked at saving money
I sucked at being generous
I sucked at being honest
I sucked at taking care of myself
I sucked at being myself
I sucked at ______________

Life forces this review because in the Third Half of Life we suffer the consequences of our choices. As George Burns said as he neared his 100th birthday, “If I had known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of my teeth.”

This is what Eastern religions call “Karma.” It’s what we mean when we say, “What goes around comes around.” Now the Bible’s words come true, “We reap what we sow.” The seeds we planted earlier produce the fruits of regret, loneliness, or ill health. That is bad news.

But, it does not have to be bad news. Remember what I said about sucking at things in my first post in this series?

Try this: substitute the words “was unskillful at” for the word “sucked” in each of the sentences above. Try it on some you wrote for yourself. Does it feel different when you read them?

The New Testament Gospel of Mark says that the Good News begins with a single word from Jesus, “turn.” “Turn” is an exact translation of the Aramaic word that Jesus used. Mark, writing in Greek, used the word “metanoia.” You know that we call a caterpillar becoming a butterfly “metamorphosis.” “Metanoia” is the same radical change in your soul/mind/heart as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

When we say, “I sucked at being a friend,” we probably feel a sense of shame and failure. Life feels like a courtroom and we have been judged guilty. That is bad news. It is such bad news that we may defend ourselves or blame others for what happened.

The words, “I was unskillful at being a friend,” radically change Life into a classroom. Instead of denying our responsibility or blaming others, we can learn from our mistakes. That is good news. We no longer have to defend ourselves, or live in a prison of shame and guilt. Even if it is too late to go back and make it up to an old friend, it is not too late to practice being a better friend now. That is a small sample of what that big word “Turn” (AKA “Repent”) means.

Learning from bad choices does not only make us more skilled. Facing our unskilled choices squarely and honestly can also make us wise. Seeing life as a classroom and not a courtroom does not minimize the seriousness of our errors, nor the difficulty of changing them. There are religions that believe it takes many lifetimes for us to learn to live life well. I am agnostic about that. But that belief does point to how difficult it is to live a life, any life, including yours, well.

OK, this is a curmudgeonly aside. This is why I can’t stand “happy, chirpy Christianity” which “celebrates” rather than worships. The music is unfailingly upbeat. The sermon series promises the perfect marriage in just six weeks. My criticism is not fair, though. It’s the kind of spirituality that works in the first half of life.

I am more interested in the spiritual journey that begins after life kicks the shit out of us, to use my mother-in-law’s favorite phrase. The journey often stops at that point because we stop to judge ourselves as failures, or to lay blame others. When we don’t let go of these things, it’s like being in prison.

The journey begins when we quit seeing Life as a courtroom. When we quit denying, blaming and defending. The journey begins when Life becomes a classroom. When we see how little we know about love and life, we are precisely at the point where the Teacher begins His Sermon on the Mount.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit (without an ego to defend).

Blessed are those who mourn (who feel remorse)

Blessed are the meek (who have become teachable)

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness (want to make their relationships right).”

If you have reached that point, you may be interested in what I have to say in upcoming posts.

It’s Good to Suck at Things 2: When We Suck At What We Were Once Good At

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“We fall down and we get up.

We fall down and we get up.

We fall down . . . and we. . . . get. . . .up!”

You may remember this song, “We fall down,”* sung by Bob Carlisle,  but even if you don’t, the refrain is all you need for background music while reading  this post.

One of the realities of this Third Half of Life is that we fall down; sometimes literally.

I fell not long ago walking across a parking lot after dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. As we got to their car, I did not see that I was stepping off a curb. I went down. I didn’t hurt anything but my dignity, but my cochlear implant processor and my glasses went flying.

I have difficulty with depth perception in low-light conditions. I was a little off-balance because of a bout with vertigo a couple of weeks earlier. Probably the Guinness I drank with dinner did not help. I fell down, but I got up.

So, there you have my organ recital. I can’t see, hear, or walk as well as I used to. I suck at things I used to be good at. This happens to all of us if we live long enough.

When it happens, we have three choices:

Denial

Despair

Defiance

Denial The best way to deny that you have a problem is to blame it on someone else. Have you ever said something like this?

“Everybody just mumbles these days. Even the ones on TV.”

“They keep shrinking the print on everything.”

“Why doesn’t the city fix the sidewalks? They are a menace.”

“All these young doctors ever talk about is losing weight. I want them to give me pills, not a sermon.”

Ironically, we most likely go into denial because we are afraid that reading glasses or hearing aids will make us look like old coots. Yet, when we talk like this we sound like old coots.

Denial can be kind of funny – until it kills us or someone else. Think about Prince Philip’s recent accident. He was lucky he did not hurt anyone.

Despair

Despair is never funny.

Despair is often accompanied by depression — another thing we tend to deny.

Despair is a decision to stay down after we fall down and not get up again. When it becomes clear that what we are eating and drinking is killing us, or at least limiting our ability to tie our shoes, we choose to believe that we cannot change. Instead we put on the slip-on shoes and find pants with an elastic waist. We accept that there is a whole list of things we cannot do anymore. We spend thousands of dollars on medications. More tragically, we become more and more isolated and lonely as we lose our eyesight, our hearing, and our mobility.

Yes, we may have to learn to live with some limitations. However, most conditions can be improved with some help and some effort. Sadly, when we start to suck at things we used to be good at, too many of us just despair. We fall down and don’t get up.

Defiance

Defiance is different from denial in that it begins with admitting that we now suck at what we used to be good at. Defiance means facing what is changing in our bodies.  It is different from despair in that it means learning what our alternatives are. It means doing the hard work of getting up after we have fallen down.

One of my heroes is  a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He not only goes to physical therapy, but does the exercises his PT prescribes.

Another is a physician and social activist who, in his 80’s, began to lose his ability to speak clearly. He goes to a speech therapist and then carefully speaks in a way the rest of us can understand.

Another hero is a woman who decided when she was 60 years old that if she did not lose weight, she wouldn’t make it to 70. She has lost more than 70 pounds and is still learning how to change her eating and exercise habits to get healthier. Since I’m married to her, I am much healthier, too. By the way, she just turned 70, but does not look like it.

That’s what defiance looks like from the outside looking in.

Here’s what it feels like on the inside.

Last Thanksgiving, my 13-year-old granddaughter sang a song for our family gathering. It was an Italian art song she sang to audition for a place in a performing arts high school. In the unbiased opinions of three of her grandparents, she was startlingly good.

The fourth grandparent had no idea. Through my sound processors it sounded like someone singing on a telephone. I know that some people who wear cochlear implants hear music in all of its richness. Most of them are musicians whose brains already know how to hear music. I am not a musician. I despaired that I would ever hear music again. I also denied that I wanted to. My cochlear implants helped me to hear and understand speech remarkably well. I told myself that was good enough. That day, however, I decided that I want to hear my granddaughter sing. I want to hear her brother play the viola that he is starting to learn.

I now have an app for people like me. Several times each week, I play games that reward me for choosing the lowest note from five options. It also gives me points when I determine whether a two-note sequence goes up or down. I was able to do that after “graduating” from a series of exercises that helped me hear the difference between a trumpet and a piano. Yes, my hearing was that bad.  Now I am moving on to listening to 60’s music on Spotify. It helps if the songs are already stored in my brain.

All this takes time, effort, and energy. I am often mentally exhausted afterward.  Nevertheless, I can now hear Petula Clark sing “Downtown” and Glen Campbell sing “Gentle on My Mind” at least as well as I first heard them over my tiny transistor radio. Best of all, I feel like I am getting up after being knocked down.

So, what are your stories? How have you fallen down? What are you doing to get back up again?

 

* The story of the origin of this song is worth reading.

It’s Good to Suck at Things 1: Leaving the Comfort Zone

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My son, Jim, likes to say that it’s good to suck at things because that is the first step toward getting good at things.

I am now using that proverb to overcome the great temptation of the Third Half of Life,

the temptation to never do anything I suck at.

I have a whole host of things that I do not suck at:

  • I can write a simple declarative sentence.
  • I can follow a recipe and cook stuff you would like to eat.
  • I can not only change a light bulb, but even a light fixture.
  • I can keep my computer running most of the time and stop my toilet from running all the time.

It is very easy for me to spend all of my time in my comfort zone.

But last month I passed a Help Wanted sign in a neighborhood store. They were advertising for a stock boy who could speak both English and Spanish. Neither I nor Donald Trump would qualify to stock shelves here in Jackson Heights.

So, I am trying to learn Spanish the way I once learned English. I don’t need a job, but I do want to be able to function in my neighborhood:

  • I started with “por favor” and “gracias”. My parents were right; “please” and “thank you” help you get along with everyone.
  • I practice asking for things in Spanish.
  • I pick up the free Spanish-language newspapers and try to read them.

As a speaker, I feel like I am three years old and as a reader, I feel like I am seven. I suck at Spanish

I also try to comprehend the bewildering universe of Marvel Superheroes. I want to have conversations with my twelve-year-old grandson. I admit, I am still hazy about the difference between the Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers. He sometimes shakes his head at my ignorance. I suck at Superheroes.

I know people who are proud that they have not learned any new skills, or picked up any new ideas in the last 20 years. Age makes us wise enough not to jump on every bandwagon.

However, if we never leave our comfort zones, if we never do anything we suck at, we are in danger of becoming the kind of old coots who bore everyone born after 1990.

The good news is that you already know how to do this.

In the 1982 movie Diner, Shrevie tells his new young wife, Beth, to ask him what is on the flip side of his records. In high school, he prided himself on memorizing every one. But, like all of us at his age, he sucked at being a grownup, so he wanted to be the cool 16-year-old he once was. The only way he was going to get good at being an adult was to stop retreating into his comfort zone.

You and I had to do the same thing in our 20’s.

I sometimes wish people would ask me about how to lead an annual church stewardship campaign. I was good at it in 1999. Now, that skill is as irrelevant as knowing what was on the flip side of “Hey, Jude.”

Over the next two weeks I’m going to be posting some more thoughts on getting good at living into this Third Half of Life.

Tell me what you are doing to move out of your comfort zone. What are you doing now that you suck at?

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After Christmas: What to Keep or Throw Away

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What is your favorite Christmas memory?

One of mine is of my two grandfathers reminiscing about their boyhood Christmases. Each of them got an orange in his stocking, as I recall. They were in wonder about how times had changed.

My memory of their memories is how Christmas works. It is memory piled on memory leading back to a memory of a child’s birth in a stable a long time ago.

Christmas kicks up memories. You hang up the tree decorations that your kids made in third grade. You stumble onto your mother’s recipe for gingerbread. The tree in the corner of your living room reminds you of other trees in other rooms. Those memories will tell you important things about who you were and what Christmas used to be.

This Christmas, no doubt, created new memories. As you shove wrapping paper into recycling bags, you may decide to forget some of what happened this Christmas. As you put away the china, you may decide to keep other memories.

What do we save and what do we throw away?

I am now an expert on this question. Last summer we moved from a 5-bedroom house to a small apartment. The five-hundred-mile move meant that it would cost more to ship our stuff than we would pay to replace it. So we got rid of about 90 percent of what we owned. That included Christmas decorations.

I learned to distinguish between things that created nostalgia

and those that create hope.

A psychiatrist once wrote:

“Nostalgia is the enemy of hope

because it makes us believe

that our best days are behind us.”

In many ways the Bible is a book full of memories that were left when all the nostalgia was gone. The memories in the Bible are memories of what God did in the past that give us hope for the future.

The Christmas stuff was not easy to sort. But most of it  only reminded us of Christmases that won’t come again. We threw away a lot of stuff. One exception were some tree ornaments Jacquie made our first year in our first parsonage.  They were Christian symbols called “Chrismons.” We did not keep them to remember the giant tree we splurged on that year. It went in a bay window and it cut the windchill in the living room. We kept them because they give us hope that Christmas, and life, can be improvised in new times and places. They remind us that the best parts of Christmas and of life will not come from a store.

The other thing we kept was a manger scene my Aunt Joyce gave us. Joyce spent forty years as a missionary in Nigeria. A Nigerian artist had carved the figures from large thorns that grow on a tree there. The manger scene takes us back to that earliest of all Christmas memories. That memory gives us hope that, even when the world is ruled by cruelty and mean-spiritedness, even when there is no room for the poor, God will come and be with us in the darkest times — in the midnight hour.

The way Christmas comes each year, and the way it goes, reminds us that nothing will ever be the same again. But, the love that put oranges in my grandfathers’ stockings, the love that sewed homemade decorations for our tree, will come again in new ways and even to new people.

I keep my memory of my long-dead grandfathers sharing their memories. I do not do so because I long for a simpler time. But because that memory gives me hope that sharing my memories  with my grandchildren will give them hope for days long after I am gone. I hope that they will be able to share memories with their grandchildren that will give them hope, as well.

So, think about what you throw away this year and what you keep.

The Sufferings of the Jewish People

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Almost two decades ago, Jacquie and I attended the ceremony in which our son, Jim, converted to Judaism. In fact, we stood on each side of him as he spoke the words that moved him from the Christianity in which he was raised, to the Judaism to which his heart and his God had led him.

Considering the fact that I am a United Methodist minister, some people wonder how his mother and I could do that.

Jacquie puts it better than I can, “I don’t believe God would want me to stop loving my son because he converted to Judaism. Besides, She would not do that, anyway.”

That is not to say that his conversion did not affect us. There  is a moment in the ceremony in which the convert takes on the sufferings of the Jewish people. Jacquie and I gulped at that. I gulped even more on Saturday when news of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh began to come in. By evening, we would know that 11 people were murdered.  The largest single attack on Jewish people in US history.

Before the shootings happened, I had invited Jim’s family for dinner. As we sat together around the table, I felt that Jim’s decision to take on the sufferings of the Jewish people now weighs on our hearts even more, because now I care not just about him, but our beloved daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, and their extended family, including their other grandparents.

Our conversation at  the table revolved, in part, around a service that our daughter-in-law, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg, had  hastily planned through the afternoon. She had sent out word through email and social media, but by dinner had only received one response from someone who said she planned to attend. Rachel said, that at least with the five of us, there would be a half dozen people there.

In fact, 29 people came.  Since Rachel’s congregation has no building, we met in a Sunday School classroom of Community United Methodist Church.  Rachel held back tears as she read an email from a colleague in Pittsburgh. She then gave us some time to sit and meditate in silence. Then, she and Jim led those who knew the words in singing the evening prayer for the end of the Sabbath.

I sat in the back, watching and praying, too. I prayed for a world where people were not hated because they  were different. I prayed in my own way and my own words to a God who, I believe, also had a son who took on the sufferings of the Jewish people.

Were We The Best Moment of Your Day?

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I don’t go to Starbucks often, I don’t drink coffee every day anymore. But I wanted a cup this morning. As I was leaving Starbucks, I saw a sign that asked, “Were We the Best Moment of Your Day?” It also asked me to post on Instagram if it was.

As I walked back to our apartment I thought about that question. It was not even 8:00 AM yet, and I’m afraid that Starbucks already had some pretty stiff competition for being the best moment in my day.

I woke up this morning as I have done 25,653 times before.  You would think it would get old, but the older I get, the more I appreciate it. In fact, it is starting to be a daily surprise! (Want to know how many days you have been alive? Click here.)

I put on my ears this morning. It is almost impossible to convey to anyone who does not wear a cochlear implant what this means. Imagine that your whole world is a silent movie and then, magically, someone turns on the sound. You hear the rain hitting the windows, the cars going by on the street, your own breathing.

I meditated this morning. This has become a high point partly because it takes me to the low points, the hard stuff, the parts of myself that I buried in deep graves when I was young. As Carl Jung promised, they started coming back at midlife with knife in hand. Now, I take time every morning to uncover them, greet them, ask them how they are doing. Slowly, and somewhat painfully, those parts of myself that I could not stand are becoming my friends.

I invited my son’s family to dinner tonight. Big deal for me. Jacquie is still in India. Can I handle entertaining even the most forgiving people in the world? It was a good moment when I decided to go for it. And an even better one when they accepted.

I saw a 3-year-old  girl in a yellow raincoat splashing in puddles this morning.  Sometimes a puddle is the best toy in the world.

What has been the best moment of your day, so far

 

How Heaven Holds Together

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We now live in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood in the Borough of Queens, in New York City.

Our grandson just started Middle School a few blocks from our home. The students at the school speak over 60 different languages in their homes. Their parents come from over 100 different countries.

This, of course, is impossible according to some of our leaders. America cannot hold together if it becomes too diverse. Part of making America great again involves making Americans the same again.

Making all Americans the same has been tried before.

My great-grandfather always said grace in German before dinner. In 1917, when the US entered WWI, he prayed in English. He and his offspring also stopped being “Schmidts” and became Smiths. They were trying to be “American.”

It worked out. It meant that they were not suspected of spying for the Kaiser, and later, for the Nazis. My father’s generation and my own grew up speaking only English, except when someone sneezes. We do not say, “God bless you!” We say, “Gesundheit”. That startles some people, but America does not fallen apart.

Jackson Heights fascinates me because it *does* hold together. It not only holds together, it thrums with energy. There are blocks full of Ecuadorians, Mexicans, Colombians and other Latin Americans . Then there are blocks of Hindus, Punjabis, Bengalis, Pakistanis, Nepalese, and Tibetans. Our closest neighbors are Chinese, Russian, and British.

Whenever I see this panoply of human diversity, I think of John’s vision of heaven in the Book of Revelation:

*After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could number, of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”*Revelation 7:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)

Friends and family roll their eyes when I make this comparison.

Jackson Heights is not heaven, they assure me. Not everyone gets along here. Not everyone believes Jesus is the Lamb of God, Much less do they sing His praises all day long.

I know, but this place still works. I chat with people at the supermarket while we are waiting to check out. We make ourselves understood in spite of barriers of language. We laugh at the same things in spite of barriers of culture.

And I am not crazy to think that maybe the answer to diversity is singing together.

Today I read a blog post by a young woman who was riding on the subway one day when a man came on spouting all kinds of bigoted nonsense in a very loud voice. The New Yorkers ignored him expecting him to move on to another car after a few minutes, but he stayed and went on and on. People started telling him to shut up. Some tried to argue with facts, but bigots aren’t part of the reality-based community.

Finally, the young woman told the man that if he did not spouting hate, she would start to sing. The man kept talking, so she started singing, a little shakily at first, “Row, Row, Row your boat . . .”

Others quickly joined her. Soon the whole car was singing, babies were beating time with their little fists. The bigot tried to shout above them, but the voices singing together drown him out. He got off at the next stop.

That incident reveals how all kinds of people can come together. They fulfilled the prophet’s vision.
We don’t have to erase our uniqueness to live together in harmony. A solo voice can be very beautiful. But many different voices singing together create the richer sound we call “harmony.”

When we shout at each other, it is hell.

When our differences come together in song, work, and a common life, it is heaven.

The Past is Ever Before Us

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Recently, I learned that people in some cultures gesture before them when they speak of the past. When they talk about the future, they gesture behind them.

It makes sense. We can see the past as clearly as we see what is in front of us. We cannot see the future, just as we cannot see what is behind our backs. (Elementary schoolteachers are an exception, of course.)

It comforts me, as we leave a place and people we love, to think of the past as ever before me. I will always be able to see those people and places in a way I am not able to see my future. But how does one do that without living in the past? How does the past become a place of reference, not residence?

Our 49th anniversary was our next-to-last day in Cleveland. We spent part of it at one of our favorite places, the Cleveland Museum of Art. CMA contains one of the best and most balanced collections of art in America.

You can see many world-famous pieces of art for free. It does not have gates inside the door, with employees “suggesting” a $20 “donation.” CMA’s trustees follow the museum’s founders’ desire that it be free “for all the people forever.”

When our sons and then our grandchildren were small, they loved the armor court. There, knights wear truly shining armor. We also loved watching our grandchildren create art on giant, super-duper iPads in the Artlens Gallery. Those are some of our favorite memories.

At the museum, Jacquie and I, farm kids who grew up knowing nothing about art, learned how to “see” art. By looking at good art, we learned the simple method of distinguishing it from bad art. As one art critic says, “When you see bad art, you first go “Wow!” Then, after looking longer, you say, “huh?”, because there isn’t much there. When you see good art, you may say, “huh?” first. But then, if you look longer, you begin to say, “Wow!”

We sat for several minutes in front of “Lot’s Wife.”This monumental painting shows the bleakest landscape you can imagine. In the foreground, are railroad tracks like the ones that carried doomed passengers to the death camps. In the background, are the shadows of what appear to be ruined buildings obscured by smoke.

Yes, when I first saw it years ago, I said, “huh”. The longer I look at it, the more I say, “Wow!”

Going to the museum symbolizes what I mean about the past being ever before us. Our memory mounts moments on the walls of our hearts like paintings in a museum. We can see faces before us the way Rembrandt saw a kitchen maid.

We can see camping trips before us the way the Hudson River School artists painted the wilderness.

We can take our time as we look at those moments. We can step back and get perspective, or move in close to see the tiny details.

Chances are, the moments that made us say, “Wow!” at first, will remain in the warehouse. The ones that we hang in the galleries of the heart will be the moments that puzzled us, maybe even pained us, or have escaped our notice until now. What was that fight about? What about those meals we shared with others?

Stepping back, we can see deeper meaning in them. We may see grace strokes that we missed at first. We may see how those moments influence our choices now, the way artists today learn to draw from Michelangelo or learn to break the rules of drawing from Picasso.

We do not put the past and all the people we have loved and all the places we have been behind us. The past is ever before us. All we have to do is look.

Burden or Anchor?

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When we were first married, we had nothing. One day, my Mom took Jacquie and me to yard sale. Mom spied an end table blackened with old varnish and asked how much it was. The person said, “five dollars.”

Mom said, “he’ll take it.”

I was a little taken aback by the way Mom was spending my money and started to object as the owner went to get her money box to receive my five dollars.

Mom said in a whisper, “It’s solid cherry.”

It was. She refinished it. It was beautiful. It became an anchor for us. It was one of the first things that Jacquie and I owned together. It was ours, instead of mine or hers. When we bought other furniture, it dictated our taste. Our first really big purchase was a cherry bedroom suite. Not many years ago, we bought a new dining room table and chairs, also cherry.

Mom refinished that end table half a century ago. It probably needs refinishing again.

Someone else can do that. It is not going with us. We are deeply grateful for my mother’s discerning eye and her hard work. We are also ready, as we approach our 50th anniversary next year, to ask ourselves what we like.

Things change in the second half of life.

What used to be an anchor can become a burden. As we let go of our old anchors, we gain the freedom to sail into whatever is next on life’s journey.

That’s the way Jacquie and I feel as we let go of so many things in order to move from our four-bedroom house in Cleveland Heights, Ohio to a small apartment in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City. We would not be going on to this next chapter if we hung on to things that cost us a lot of money. or that have deep sentimental value, or just seem like the things that two people our age ought to have.

In some ways, my mother is my model for this. When my Dad died, she had a house jam-packed with so many things she had refinished. She had a barn full of things (especially chairs, for some reason) that she was going to refinish. She had never lived more than 15 miles from where she was born in Western New York. But she left almost all of it behind to move to a retirement community in New Hampshire, near my youngest sister. As the Alzheimer’s progressed, she moved from her large independent living apartment to a smaller assisted living apartment. She eventually shared a room with another patient in the memory unit and died owning a bed, a chair, a dresser, and a small bookshelf. One shelf was full of Agatha Christie mysteries. She said the great thing about Alzheimer’s was that she could read them again since she couldn’t remember how they came out.

Someday, even our old bodies that have anchored us to this earth for so many good years will become burdens that we will need to lay down, too.

I hope that when we do, we will be able to sail away to whatever is next.