Practice the Ending First

In a recent class with 7^th graders, I began teaching a piece by teaching the ending first.  I shared this strategy with them as a way to move into more familiar territory when learning a piece. An interesting contrast to mastering the first part and then moving into the unknown. The latter a  more common practice, to be sure, but the other is an interesting variation. 

 

And then thinking the way I do, I wondered if this strategy could be applied to living a life. “Moving into the unknown” pretty much describes how we live our life and makes sense, as the future is not there written out like a piece of music as something we can learn first. But there are qualities of the end parts of life that are accessible at all ages and it got me thinking that it could be a good idea to pay attention to them when you’re younger to prepare yourself for the fuller version of them when you’re older. 

 

What are the gifts of the last stage of life? We know all too well the maddening challenges of the ever-diminishing and decreasing physical body, the difficulties of reduced sight, hearing, muscular strength, endurance, libido. The mirror reminds us of our once familiar faces now sagging, wrinkling, growing moles or unwanted hairs. But what if all of this is not just the work of a mean-spirited Creator who gets his/her kicks watching us suffer? Might they all be signs of a greater and more positive purpose?

 

James Hillman’s book The Force of Character and Helen Luke’s book Old Age both suggest that there is indeed. The decline of the physical body makes room for the enlargement of the Soul. It suggests strongly that we stop paying attention to the superficial—how do we look? How can we show off our muscles or alluring shape? Who can we impress?— and begin to attend to deeper and more important values. Our diminished hearing shields us from all the unnecessary small talk, our diminished outer sight re-focuses us to our inner visions. 

 

I can personally testify, as can so many in my peer group, that in our 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and beyond, we can become more patient, more forgiving, more understanding and yes, even more wise as we have lived long enough to know that “this, too, shall pass” when life and life’s events seem intolerable. We can become more forthright and say what needs to be said without worrying if it will make us unpopular. As Hillman puts it:

 

“…life intends aging just as it intends growth in youth. As we unfold into speaking, standing, walking, discriminating, and mastering, so we may infold into the involution of aging. “

 

Helen Luke invokes King Lear in her thoughts about aging:

 

“As we grow old, our body weakens, our powers fail, our sight dims, our hearing fades, our power to move around is taken from us. In one way or another we are imprisoned and the moment of choice then comes to us. Will we fight this confining process or will we go to meet it in the spirit of King Lear—embrace it with love, with eagerness even?”

 

What is needed to develop the strength and courage and character to meet our inevitable decline, to face our mortality? Ms. Luke talks about the term “growing old” in its most positive sense. If we make the conscious decision to grow into our aging, we have the possibility of coming into the final flowering and meaning of our lives. If we resist it, are dragged into it by the lion’s paw of time protesting, crying out, making appointments with the plastic surgeon, we will simply become “olders,” not “elders.” True eldership doesn’t come for free just with the passage of time but must be consciously earned. 

 

So returning to the original premise of practicing the end first, I would suggest contemplating one’s mortality at every stage of life, not out of fear or cynicism, but as a way to strengthen our ability to separate the truly important from the trivial, to savor each gift of life and express appropriate gratitude, to forgive others and ourselves so that when we arrive at the time of life when we can begin to let go of outer achievement and impressing people, we are prepared. Practice the ending now so those last notes can truly ring out!