🙏 The View from Here
What the years bring into focus
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”—Søren Kierkegaard, Journals (JJ:167, 1843)
“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, ESV).
My friend in Victoria has sent me the same birthday message every year since grad school. Five ominous words: “Beware the Ides of March.” For a long time, it was just a quirky greeting, his way of acknowledging that my birthday falls on the same date as history’s most famous warning. I smiled, replied with thanks, and moved on. Only recently has the full weight of it sunk in. Caesar had the warning right in front of him and ignored it. Some messages require decades of context to become legible.
This morning, I woke up on the Ides of March and reached for the first of three pairs of glasses.
The reading glasses sit on my desk, tuned to the distance between my eyes and the computer screen. The words are crisp with them on; everything beyond dissolves into a blur. When I leave the desk, I switch to progressives, lenses that shift as I look from the road to the dashboard to the grocery list in my hand. Later, for something held close, I take both off entirely and hold the thing inches from my face.
Three lenses, three distances. My view changes before lunch, and without the right pair for the moment, I cannot see at all.
Diabetes is the engine underneath most of this. My vision has been changing for years, and I manage it the way people manage what accumulates with age: one adaptation at a time. Another set of lenses. Another drawer to keep them in. The adjustments are small, daily, and endless.
I think about my mother now in ways I could not have twenty years ago. She used to hold prescription bottles at arm’s length, squinting, tilting them toward the light. I watched many times without understanding what I was seeing. From where I stood then, it looked like stubbornness, a refusal to accept help. From where I stand now, I recognize the negotiation. She was doing what I do every morning: finding the right distance for what was in front of her.
The same recognition happened with shoes. I used to notice older men wearing dress pants with sneakers and wonder what possessed them to commit such a fashion faux pas. These days, I wear Skechers because neuropathy has made my feet unreliable. The slip-ins quiet the discomfort enough to walk without wincing. I am now the man in dress pants and sneakers. Those men were making accommodations I could not see because I had not yet needed to make any myself.
The view from here includes what I missed growing up. Last week I watched an older couple eat dinner in near-silence, exchanging maybe ten words across the whole meal. Years ago, I would have found that depressing. Now, I recognized what I was seeing: a conversation so fluent it no longer required words. That kind of seeing requires a prescription that takes years to develop.
A birthday at this age widens the frame. The world before me is the same world it was at thirty, forty, or fifty. I just see more of it now.
This article appeared in FLORIDA TODAY as How birthday brings new perspective on aging | Spirituality Today.
Happy Birthday, any way.