Still dancing, but the music’s slower…

“We learn by practice. Whether it means to learn

to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to

live by practicing living…one becomes

in some area an athlete of God.”

- Martha Graham

As I looked around the room, nobody appeared as old as I had expected!

Moving along in life has its benefits, and I suppose deficits too. I try hard not to think about the down side of aging, because unless I am doing something that requires a fair amount of exertion, I really don’t notice much difference in the effects that time and gravity have unrelentingly brought to bear.

In fact, my ‘several times a week’ exercise classes at the YMCA are really the only time I feel exhausted – or at least close to it – in the course of my daily life. The regularity of exceeding my predicted maximal heart rate for 20 minutes or so of the 50 minute classes, seems to have increased my functional capacity enough that I actually don’t notice much strain in my activities of daily living…well except those 40 pound (18kg) bags of cat litter that seem to be relatively heavier than they used to!

I recently attended my 50^th high school reunion, and if confession is truly good for the soul, I confess I expected to see a bunch of tired old folks doing the best they could to look chipper. I expected to have to squint indelicately at nametags and do the best I could to remember who some of my classmates were.  The first night, I expected to eat a little food, have a little to drink and then along with everyone else, tuck in early to prepare for a second day of activities.

As it turned out at the first evening’s affair, I was surprised to see an extremely lively group of people genuinely delighted to see one another. I listened to and participated in conversations that were upbeat and appreciative, and to be frank, just plain fun. It was, in the vernacular of my day (our days), a happening!  There may have been a wallflower or two, or a couple of fuddy duddies somewhere, but I didn’t see them.

There were some folk I had not seen since walking across the stage at graduation, and yet there honestly did not seem to be a real stranger in the crowd. Surely, I didn’t know everyone, nor had I known everyone when I was in high school, but the sense of family, community and fraternity was palpable.

All of this happened against the tapestry of everyone knowing the time we have left on the planet was significantly less than the ‘time in service’ for which we had been called.

That really is it, isn’t it?

None of us asked to be born and come here, let alone to a specific era or time…and yet, here we are – and there we were, all together…people who entered life with little in our toolkits than curiosity and faith…curiosity to wonder what the heck was going on, and faith that like glue, caused the things we saw, touched, smelled, tasted and heard begin building a tapestry of thought and experience allowing us to navigate this foreign and new world.

As I looked around the room on the two nights I spent amongst these fellow travelers, I could not help but remember moments I had shared with many of them, but more so at the mystically magical urge we have to bond together as human beings…even more, that as the faces though a little more ‘mature’ and possibly less resilient from decades of breathing untold number of breaths and heart beats…something else had matured and that was a sense of gratitude for the few moments of our lives that we shared together in that small town in the West Virginia hills from whence our lives were cultivated.

I was reminded that time and gravity has no governance on the human spirit, and for those brief and shining moments, we floated together like brilliant leaves on the autumn winds.

- ted