My seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he
wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever."
And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice,
"Nana, will you ever get sick and die? "I think this pretty much says it for me and
most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread.
So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday, and I decided to compile a list of
everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good
to be sure of a few things. For instance, I am no longer 47, although this is the age
I feel, and the age I like to think of myself as being. My friend Paul used to say in his
late 70s that he felt like a young man with something really wrong with him.Our true
person is outside of time and space, but looking at the paperwork, I can, in fact, see
that I was born in 1954. My inside self is outside of time and space. It doesn't have an
age. I'm every age I've ever been, and so are you, although I can't help mentioning as
an aside that it might have been helpful if I hadn't followed the skin care rules of the
60s, which involved getting as much sun as possible while slathered in baby oil and
basking in the glow of a tinfoil reflector shield.It was so liberating, though, to face
the truth that I was no longer in the last throes of middle age, that I decided to write
down every single true thing I know. People feel really doomed and overwhelmed
these days, and they keep asking me what's true. So I hope that my list of things I'm
almost positive about might offer some basic operating instructions to anyone who
is feeling really overwhelmed or beleaguered. Number one: the first and truest
thing is that all truth is a paradox. Life is both a precious, unfathomably beautiful
gift, and it's impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It's been a very
bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It's so hard and weird
that we sometimes wonder if we're being punked. It's filled simultaneously with
heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, desperate poverty, floods and babies and
acne and Mozart, all swirled together. I don't think it's an ideal system.