The beauty of age

The other morning I walked down to the building where my brother and sister-in-law live. It was to my mind, just about the most perfect day I could imagine. The sky was brilliantly clear, the air was crisp and not too cold, the colors were radiant: yellows, oranges, reds in trees and flowers even and green grass. Wonderful. 

What went through my mind as I walked was a sense that this almost perfect beauty was like a gift to hold on to before the grey and blear of winter set in. It is a bit like the hope and lift of the heart you feel when you see the first signs of Spring's very different beauty.

Then, I suppose because it is what some people my age think about, I found myself contrasting this prelude of glorious if slightly fading beauty before the grey of winter, with middle and old age. Middle age is, or can be, in so many ways a beautiful time. One is, if well, still fit enough to do what one wants physically and mentally. There is, hopefully, a certain wisdom that makes life a bit more peaceful and sometimes, as a gift, there can be quite, quite brilliant understanding and appreciation of the beauty of life. All this of course, is subject to the qualifications of life experience - a bit, possibly, like the difference between a tree that is quite beautiful but whose colours are modified by blotches of some sort and a tree that has remained relatively unscathed.

Then, slowly we move into old age - the wintery season of our lives as Karl Rahner would put it - when we are losing our leaves and feeling less full of the energy that propelled us earlier. We become - many of us - increasingly less agile and more dependent and sometimes distressed by all this. And yet, and yet... isn't there a magnificent, stark beauty in the winter trees? You can see their shapes and the strength of their trunks and guess the depths of their roots. So perhaps, however badly we may feel, we could also see beauty in age - it is after all, its own part of the journey. We tend sometimes it seems to me, to see the frailty, possibly the crankiness, the wrinkles. But why can't these be beautiful? They are after all, the fruit of a life lived and every single one of us, if we do not die young, will arrive there in the end. Maybe we lose a lot of the enjoyment of life when we too narrowly define beauty.