The simple lesson it took me a half century to understand

In a memorable joke, a snail slithers into a bank, robs it, and slithers out the door and down the sidewalk to freedom. Minutes later the police arrive and interview the witness, a turtle next in the teller’s line, asking the languid leatherback what he saw. "I don’t know," the terrapin replies in exasperation. "It all happened so fast."

The joke’s larger truth is a universal one: Perspective matters, with respect not only to speed but also to time. I know this because every day I feel more and more like that bemused turtle at the bank, watching the events around me transpire but thinking differently than before about them. Here’s what I mean.

I don’t relish putting on night-vision goggles just to read dinner menus in dimly lit restaurants. After long-distance runs, I don’t enjoy icing my knees like Willis Reed after Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals. The harsh and unforgiving truth of my own mortality – Father Time is undefeated – is an unpleasant one to recall.

With more turns around the sun comes the sense of need for forgiveness for mistakes made. (Stefan Tomic/iStock)

Yet aging, for all its aches and indignities, is not without its blessings. I began to notice this three years ago, when my odometer showed five decades of earthly drive-time. Suddenly, I began to think in the half-century increments I’d just attained. This habit of reflection encouraged in me a certain kind of humility.

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For those 50 years of my life had passed as quickly as a snap of the fingers. This was so despite the fact that my 16th and 21st birthdays, as well as every preadolescent Christmas, took what felt like forever to arrive. Looking back now, all these far off moments seem like they happened only yesterday.

Having lived half a century taught me that the period of time was nowhere near as expansive as I’d previously believed. Five decades before the year of my birth, 1921 was the age of Charlie Chaplin in America, of independence for the Republic of Ireland, and of Adolf Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany’s Nazi Party.

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Those distant events, in times so different from our own, could no longer be dismissed as a lifetime ago, as once I breezily surmised. Now they were my lifetime ago, which is to say, not distant at all. This made me wonder what life was like another 50 years – again, merely my then-granted years – before 1921.

The year 1871 was the Reconstruction era in America, a mere six years after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. When someone twice my age engages in this time travel of the mind, I suspect the results are twice as humbling, especially in America, a country still so young.

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Aging turns out to be a wonderful tonic against chronological snobbery, as literary Englishmen C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield nicely put it, or the notion that the past is inherently inferior to the present. The older you get, the more you live in both worlds, the past and the present. The more you judge the past, the more you realize you’re only judging yourself.

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With more turns around the sun comes the sense of need for forgiveness for mistakes made. In his essay "On Household Gods and Goblins," English polymath G.K. Chesterton said as much: "For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy." Chesterton was right. Rarely do I cry for justice anymore, only tender mercy.

Therein lies the joy of aging. I’m grateful for a habituation toward humility that accumulated and accumulating years have bestowed upon me. Changed temporal perspective reminds me that human beings may change, but human nature does not. 

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Our ancestors made different mistakes than we do - some graver than others – just as we will have done in the eyes of our progeny. But unaided by divine grace, err we humans have done and will continue to do in a fallen world, until the end of time.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux once was asked what the three most important virtues were. His answer – humility, humility, humility – is a great one, and an important lesson that aging teaches over and over again, if only you let it.

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