My Age is as a Lusty Winter

I’m about to get a lot happier if I don’t kill myself first.

Those are my conclusions based on some conflicting research I recently came across. A recent Gallup pole published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that at fifty people’s sense of satisfaction tends to rise with a bullet. If we hang ride that rocket for the next thirty-five years we end up being as happy as we were at our previous peak age of eighteen. The difference, of course, is that at eight-five our happiness includes reality, whereas at eighteen we’re just too stupid to know better. And the half-century mark seems to be the Rubicon for both positive and negative emotions: anger, sadness, worry - after fifty they start dropping like the Dow Jones Average.

On the other hand, the latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control show a spike in suicides between the ages of forty-five and fifty-four. For the last three years, this tranche of the population has offed itself at a higher rate than any other. Over seventeen percent of this demographic dies by its own hand, and men at a rate three times as high as women.

So, since a shiny new AARP card with my name on it slithered out of an envelope in yesterday’s mail, I can’t help but wondering: should I be laughing all the way to the morgue? That latest zero on my odometer begins to take on a new significance, but just what does it signify?

Well, there is this: the Gallup people report that happiness tanks big-time after the teenage years. I have a theory about why that may be. Perhaps beyond that point, as we lose that bullet-proof varsity letter jacket and the bullet-proof pecs that filled it out, we learn that our own bodies - and our own selves - aren’t sufficiently durable vehicles to get us all the way to the finish line. We marry and have kids, we commit to a job (we thought it was a “career” or a “vocation” but most days it ends up being a job) and must do that job in a community of coworkers. If we’re the Evangelical type, we leave the youth group and discover that we must now follow Christ and even attend church without big events featuring hip knock-offs of secular T-shirts and regular cry-fests at various camps and retreats (though serious addicts can do the Promise Keepers or the Walk to Emmaus as a sort of methadone). In other words, we cease building a self and begin instead investing it in those around us. We learn to apply the wisdom of Jesus in the social as well as the financial aspect: we stop storing our treasure in the increasingly moth-munched, rust-rotted, time-pillaged vault of our own bodies and minds and instead sink more and more of it into the unpredictable argosies of other people.

And then, after a long time of perhaps feeling that God has suckered us in a shell game where the pea isn’t under any of the three cups, we look up and discover that the prize is all around us in meaningful relationships with Christ and other people.

All of this is on my mind because in addition to celebrating my entrance into 1) The Happiness Demographic, 2) The Suicide Sector, and 3) the AARP, I am celebrating something else today: my twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. AND, just over a week ago, I performed the ceremony as my older son married a wonderful young woman who (for reasons best known to her) loves him madly. Fifty years of crawling between earth and heaven; twenty-six years of loving, honoring, and cherishing. Twenty-four years of trying to raise a son who, I found out early on, was smarter than I was. Where did the time go? Into my Lord, who turns my stumbling steps toward him into true transformation. Into my wife, my two boys, the three congregations I tried to serve, and the students I now teach. So I haven’t lost my youth; I know right where it is. I simply put it into relationships: Mortality Tupperware, containers that can keep it fresh.

So on my anniversary, I think I’ll round things off with the words of a better writer who, long ago, said much the same thing:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.

This entry was posted on June 9, 2010 at 9:20 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.