Hard Human Bones, or Drifting Jellyfish

Getting old means I’m experiencing an increasing number of major life changes, including career transitions and retirement, my children that have become adults, the loss of loved ones, health challenges, and eventually the loss of my independence.

How am I going to handle these changes?

I was looking up at the dark night sky in Nandi Hills, Kenya, and I was surprised to see the same Milky Way Galaxy, when standing by Great Slave Lake in the NWT.

Earth, a tiny planet in our solar system, is very insignificant in our galaxy. Scaling down even further is me. One human. From this scale it’s easy to doubt my importance. It does something to my thinking about human life.

I’m in the midst of a vague, “what am I doing here?” season. Uncertain as to what defines my life over seven decades.

A recurring question is, “How do I measure a week's work, when there’s not much that looks like “work” anymore?”

Culture and social media tell my people to do and say whatever we want as long as we go with the flow. The norms in my community, as we grow old are relatively straight forward. And most of us go along, partly because we don't know what else to do.

I’ve seen how public opinion can blur the truth about my worth. Oh yes, it’s often easiest to respond to my new unstructured weekdays like the jellyfish. It drifts in the currents and reactively modifies its behavior to suit new circumstances.

But there’s a defining sense of “humanness” that I’m still seeking. It’s not the external voices that were so significant in much of my working life when I was directed by outside influences.

I’m trying to hear an internal whisper. It calls to me, “Grayson, have the courage and wisdom to ask the right questions, such as: ‘At 72, why are you here?’”

And another whisper from the deepest, mysterious part of my soul; “Grayson, you still have much more to know, and to share with your friends.”

There’s some people who have refused to react like a boneless jellyfish: Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi. They are the people with tough bones.

I want to be in a small way, like them. Willing to leave a mark, even be called “wrong”. I have a growing sense of curiosity about how to codify what’s “in here”, these human bones. It’s about living out a cause that may not be socially convenient. It means I have to stop myself from just reacting, drifting quietly into whatever is expected of me.

This is going to take some work. Certainly it’s not like "going to work at my job”.

I need to clarify my cause, then speak, even when it would be easier to stay quiet.

Act when it would be simply less trouble to drift into leisure.

I may not change the world like the great leaders I admire, but I can refuse to drift like a jellyfish. I want the years ahead to show that I had hard bones.

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I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn or Facebook​

See you next week,

Grayson

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