Been Searchin'

In 1957, I was twelve years old. I was a skinny thing in seventh grade at JHS 44 on Columbus Avenue where my primary function seemed to be doing other people’s homework. I wasn’t savvy enough to charge for this service. It was all quid pro quo. You let me hang out on the fringes of groups of girls with big hair and expertly applied mascara and I’ll see that you learn how to conjugate irregular verbs in French. In the background, the Coasters were singing Searchin’, the B-side of a 45 that wasn’t supposed to be the big hit. But for me, it was everything. I was born searchin’ every which way, always trying to figure it out, always weighed down by the big questions. I didn’t care about what shoes were in style. I wanted to know why we were here, what was the point of it all.

Seek and ye shall find, we read in Matthew’s Gospel. Seek My face, says the Psalmist. This yearning, this searching, seems to be central to the western spiritual traditions. I visited the labyrinth at the First Congregational Church of Sheffield recently and again on Yom Kippur at Beth Israel synagogue in North Adams, Christianity and Judaism miraculously walking in the same circles. But what if you get lost or preoccupied and you never reach your destination? What if there is no destination and what if the seeking paradigm itself has outlived its usefulness? It reminds me of the people we saw on the beach near Newburyport who came armed with metal detectors to find coins or better yet gold jewelry, the remains of someone else’s day, buried under the sand. We saw these folks, three guys who were maybe strangers to one another, maybe compatriots talking shop, with their magnets and their earphones, patiently shuffling up and down the beach in a mime of walking meditation. Searching.

Seeking involves leaning in, even if you’re not Sheryl Sandberg. You focus on the distant horizon to see what’s out there, to determine your direction, your path forward. Maybe it’s an unintended outcome of the pandemic, but I can feel the zeitgeist shifting from leaning forward to sitting back, resting, letting events unfold. But maybe it’s just me with my capacity to hold either the future or the past shrinking along with my vocal range. Time was I could hit the high notes and remember all the lyrics, but now the world and I are a little tired. I may need to get myself a fake book.

In 1957, we were fed a steady diet of aspiration. Towering skyscrapers, man on the moon, eradication of disease. Limousines disgorged women in saris and men in keffiyehs on First Avenue at the entrance to the glass slab United Nations building where, we were told, they were gathering to make peace. Bigger and faster gave lip service to kinder and gentler in the postwar world. Cynicism was frowned upon. It did not occur to me that the future might ever be in doubt. Now, nothing comes sharply into focus. I try to imagine the world my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit, but I seem to have misplaced my magic eyeglasses. It is outside the limits of my mental acuity. The future, after all, doesn’t exist the way your refrigerator exists. It is a category of the mind, of the imagination, and I am increasingly reclining into the concrete, if only I can continue to parse the distinction between reclining and declining.

David Whyte says “We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home.” And what are the rhythms of my house, the primary activities of my day? Preparing food and savoring it, sleeping, washing, walking, reading and writing, looking and listening, speaking to my loved ones, touching them when I can. And to that list, I would add giving thanks that I can do each of those things because I see the suffering that arises when walking is no longer possible, when speech is the greatest effort. In moments of truly aging in amazement, I sit back. I get comfortable and let the stream of gratitude flow unimpeded.

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My 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, is available directly from me, from Amazon or on order from your local bookseller.