Value the Moment, Honor the History, Understand the Journey

The day after the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, I was in Salem, Oregon, for a dragon boat race. My team was warming up on a brick-covered picnic area. I leaned over for a stretch and found myself face to face with the inscribed brick you see pictured here.

I stopped. The park around me seemed to inhale and hold its own breath. Five words and a few numbers sent me falling  through a telescoping tunnel of history, and I wondered, Would everyone see in these letters and numbers what I saw? Because what I saw was an epitaph, a love-letter, a hidden grief. I saw one man with a full name, one without. I saw a date of death in 1991. I saw AIDS, and all the loss and secrecy and grief and politics hidden within it. I saw a time in history when the idea of gay marriage wasn't even part of the conversation, when the hope was for recognition, for the right to acceptance, for safety and community and belonging and love without a death sentence attached to it. I saw another time where a marginalized group was insisting, in the face of bigotry, that their lives mattered. And then, with the mental roar of a jet engine, I fast-forwarded to now, and the significance of the Supreme Court ruling, and the celebrations throughout the country, and a Facebook image posted that afternoon of a friend, a survivor of that terrible era of AIDS, standing, holding hands and saying vows with his partner. These two images - the brick in the park and the photo from Facebook, melded into one and I saw the journey writ large across my mind, overwhelming in its significance.

I blinked and stood up and looked at the circle of people around me who continued about their business. And I went about my business, too, but my heart held the journey - then, and now, and everything in between. I couldn't let it go.

As I thought about that moment and its meaning, and as I tried to explain it to the people around me, I found words inadequate. I stood at a strange crossroads of past, present, and future. 

The day before, I'd been at a high school graduation party and heard a group of young people talking so openly and casually about sexual orientation. It was no big deal who was what. They are the future. Do they know the past? Do they understand the journey that led to this moment? The whole journey? Do I?

There is an incredible young adult book that speaks with exquisite eloquence about this particular convergence of past, present and future. It's by David Levithan and it's called TWO BOYS KISSING. Read it. 

That moment looking at the brick in the park resonated beyond the journey of gay rights and LGBT history for me. As I age, my relationship to time - to the past, present and future - changes. When I was very young, I lived mostly in the present. Soon, my attention shifted to the future. Who would I be when I grew up? What college would I go to? What would I do after college? Where would I live? Would I get married? Would I have children? The future - always the future. But now that I've rounded the corner of middle age, the past - its value and meaning - occupy a growing portion of my attention. 

Friends, contemporaries, face terminal illness or sudden death from heart disease. Children marry and start families. Parents struggle with the challenges of aging. Technology leaves me in the dust. The world around me becomes increasingly different. My neighborhood is changing. I see city blocks with buildings razed, and I find myself asking "What used to be there?" 

That question looms in my mind. What used to be there? Memory, communal memory - that's what history really is and remembering history is more than being "condemned to repeat it." We need to hold and preserve our communal memories in order to understand ourselves, to appreciate our present and to grapple with our future. It is frighteningly easy for that memory to disintegrate like old silk and crumble into nothing. When that memory includes part of your own story, the thought that it will evaporate is heartbreaking and terrifying and infuriating all at once.

We have a responsibility to record the journeys. For some, it is through writing. For others, through film or the visual arts or music. For some, the responsibility lies not in the telling, but in the asking and the listening and the learning. And the noticing - stopping and noticing a small group of words and numbers on a brick on the ground in a park by a river, and registering their significance.

Ruminating on the Future of the World

That's a pretty huge and imposing title for the small, meandering thing I'm doing this morning as I sit in my garden with the breeze blowing and the birds singing and the sounds of revitalization from the home remodel next door. But, in essence, that's what I'm doing - contemplating the future of the world, something I realize, with each passing year, is only marginally in my hands. Perhaps being in your late 40's automatically nudges you into contemplation of generational differences, and makes you prone to despair if you fall prey to the generational gap mindset, the "what's wrong with kids today" thinking. On the other hand, being in the sandwich generation caught between aging parents and adult children while shouldering the responsibilities and burdens of maturity (mortgage, career, your own first hints of health issues and mortality) can make you more desirous to understand the other generations, and more aware of the fact that you, like your parents, will one day fade and be replaced by those young adults.

I work alongside colleagues who are the same age as my stepson, the young man I helped raise. My peers grieve the loss of their parents. Some of my peers succumb to heart disease and other early vanguards of our own aging bodies. Having been a young adult during the AIDS epidemic, I have had some prior experience confronting mortality, but back then I could rage against it, whereas now I see it for what it is - the inevitable truth for all of us.

That may sound bleak, but it's just realistic. It's realistic to acknowledge that your parents will die, and you will die, and that means thinking about what will be left. What will your legacy be? Who will be left to tend the garden of the world? Suddenly, the natural parental worrying you engage in as you think about your now-grown child (Will they find happiness? Will they make their way in the world? Have I given them the tools they need? Will they find someone to love, someone who loves them? Who will they be today, tomorrow, next year, in ten years' time, when I am gone?) expands to become questions about that child's entire generation, and how they will shape the future, what kind of world you will leave them and what they will do with that world.

I stepped into this reflecting pool of questions this morning through a strange route. The soil of my brain was already well primed, as I've been reading a book by Jon Savage called TEENAGE: THE CREATION OF YOUTH CULTURE. Then, my husband and I have been wrestling with the evolving relationship between us and our son, who just turned 29 and is no doubt wrestling with his own special challenges as he faces that milestone. I sat down with my cup of coffee in the garden and began to read an article in the New York Times about the recently released Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and was struck by one paragraph that began "Now 28."

Now 28. The same age as my stepson (until a month ago). The same age as my new colleague at work. The Millenial Generation is taking the stage. And, despite vast differences in the surface facts of their lives, there was some underlying shape to Sgt. Bergdahl's journey and struggles to find his way in the world that struck a familiar chord.

I stopped reading the article. I thought about this new generation, their lives and experiences - the self-esteem movement, the attacks of 9-11, the deep economic recession, Hurricane Katrina, the debate on climate change, the digital age, the first African-American president. I went online and started scanning the vast collection of articles attempting to understand this generation. There were some common threads, some things that rang true, some wide discrepancies and conflicting accounts. There was a great deal of speculation, and a certain amount of earnest hope.

I started thinking about this ritual we engage in - naming a generation, seeking to codify it, to predict how it will behave, how to engage with it, how to mobilize it, how it will change our world. We know, from history, that our world changes. We of a certain age are old enough to testify to that first hand, just as our parents have ("When I was a kid ...." "Remember when ....") and their parents before them. We vacillate between fear or despair in the future and hope. Despair always reaches for me. I choose hope. It's harder to choose.

The world has many problems, many causes for despair. It always has. Maybe at some point, the ability to change those problems can only come from a new generation. Not because the previous generations have failed. They haven't. But this world of ours will always, by its very nature, be a work in progress, and in constant flux, a perpetual balancing act. Previous generations have brought about amazing and wonderful changes, and sometimes unintended bad consequences and misguided steps, and some downright bad decisions. So has my own generation. We're all just experimenting, and we always begin that process under the conviction of youth, the conviction that we're right. Maybe we'd never have the guts to experiment otherwise. A new generation can see our work with fresh eyes. They can envision things that may simply be outside our view.

So, this morning, from the sunshine and shadow of my garden, I send out prayers and blessings to the next generation as, step by step, they take their place center stage and, piece by piece, they take the world into their hands. Like a first bike ride, we won't let go too soon, and we might even hang on too long. Our parents are behind us doing the same. When we do let go, we'll keep watching, anxious, cheering, worrying, trying somehow to steer when we no longer can, wincing when they fall and encouraging them to get back up, until eventually they disappear around the corner and out of view.

Stepping Outside Your Age Zone

When I was in my early twenties, I always felt I had something to prove.  Too often I thought everyone older than me was looking down their noses at me, questioning what I could possibly bring to the table.  Left to my own devices, most of my friends were within my age range.  I'm sure my bristly desire to prove myself was annoying.

Now I'm in my late forties, and I see the generation gap with a different light.  I want my experience recognized.  I want to share what I've learned with others.  When I run into the age gap via movie references, technology or other experiences, I pull up short, nonplussed by this unexpected disconnect.  I have an odd need to point the disconnect out to others when it happens.  I suspect this is annoying, too.

However, I'm developing a real appreciation for the value of connecting with people of different ages and experience levels.  After all, every one of us has the potential to experience life at a variety of ages.  There is a common foundation there.

A younger person's perspective actually heightens the flavor of my own youthful experiences.  It gives me new insight into that version of myself, and reminds me of things I don't want to lose.  It's healthy for my mind and emotions, whether that perspective is an 8 year old or a 28 year old or something in between.  The effort to understand that person's viewpoint and learn from them provides an excellent antidote to encroaching codgerdom and judgmental stereotyping.

On the other hand, my relationships with folks older than me have taken on a new kind of poignance and significance, as the distance between myself and them shrinks.  The outer container of face and body loses some of its relevance.  I'm more keenly aware of the existence of an entire lifetime of memories inside that person.

Beyond the one-sided benefits, there is a certain positive, engaging creative chemistry born from cross-age interactions of all sorts.  When the generational walls come down and we actually connect on some other common ground (literature, writing, favorite activities, music, family), the best of every contributing age seasons the soup that is our shared humanity.

We humans tend to hang with people our own age.  It's hard to understand people who are at a different stage of life.  But there's much to be gained when you step outside your age zone.