On the cusp of Sixty

I’ve been told that sixty is the new fifty. People also tried to convince me that brown was the new black. It is what it is, as the next decade approaches with warp speed. The rounded numbers remind me that
time, even heart-breaking time passes. I have come through what I expect will be the most difficult decade of my life. (The aftermath of a tragedy that took three young lives.) Though heart-scarred, the calling on my life to a greater beauty, gives me an optimistic caution to proceed with a keep-on-walking hope, and a smile.

“ It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”
― Rose Kennedy

My grand-daughter (age 8) sent a lovely poem by snail mail that arrived on time, the first verse gives her summation of her view. Simply stated:

Here comes your birthday, you’re getting old,                                                                                            You’re also getting very bold                                                                                                                What a great gramma you’ve become                                                                                                                  How I wish I could stick up my thumb!

I take that last line as a thumbs up. She states my desire to face the future with a boldness, with an expectancy that there is still much beauty in this world, and I want to participate, not spectate.

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

“We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen—feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from another plane. Dare to listen. Dare to hear with your heart.”
― C.J. Heck, Bits and Pieces: Short Stories from a Writer’s Soul

My journey has brought me to this day, this age and I share with the sentiment found in first Samuel (7:12) to say “Thus far has the Lord helped us/me.”