Reflections on Aging
by Charles LaFond, Potter, Senior Director, Development and Donor Communications
Seeing a potter’s pot in a museum is one of the great delights of my life. I wander through the British Museum, the Oxford Museum, and the Seattle Asian Museum. As I look at those pots, I imagine those dead potters whose fingertips I can see in these pots circling, circling, circling. They are often thousands of years old, still holding the cuts of a jagged fingernail a millennium later. What was their life like? What did they think and feel at the end of their potter’s life?
What will I feel at the end of my potter’s life?
Am I willing to think of that question? Can I imagine what that last feeling will be? I know the answer. I will feel love for my closest friends, my sister Linda, and my dogs Sugar and Kai. At the end, my last feeling will be gratitude. Not regret. Not rage. Not disappointment. Just gratitude. And that final thought, which I expect, has made, and will make, a contented life. Not happy. Happiness is fleeting like a rainbow. Content. Content is a great feeling and a grand way of being on this planet for such a brief moment in this sack of meat and calcium that I call a body.
My body will decay or become ash. But the love and the pots I have “made” will last thousands of years. Perhaps one day, in 2090 CE or 3030 CE or 9030 CE, my life will have been rightly forgotten. But a pot I made, or its shards, or perhaps a book I have written, will still exist somewhere with my finger marks – mine, frozen on its walls or ink on its pages.
When the end is near, so many of us will be unprepared for that moment or time before death, and so too lacking the vocabulary for those great conversations within ourselves or with others.
I spent my inheritance on travel as a youth. Had I invested it in land on Whidbey Island or in Microsoft stocks in the 1980s, I would be preposterously wealthy today.
But instead, I travelled the world. I saw, tasted, and felt its beauty and even some of its ugliness. As I look back at 62, I’m not wealthy, and there is a tendency to wish I were comfortable, secure, glamorous, and new; luxurious travel would be mine to enjoy in this achy, creaky, tired body. However, as I look back on those choices, I feel, deep in my soul-energy, that I made the right choices or at least the best I could have at the time. I may not have wealth, but I do have a life that is rich with experience. And I use that as a tool.
When the end comes for my life, what, when looking back, will I feel? This question makes it easier to choose what I want from life. The answers to this question change so much over the decades. “What was the answer each decade?” is a fun question for journaling. Why? Why do I want those things? For me, it’s usually to be impressive. For others, it’s wealth, satiation, or power, but mostly love. If we can teach ourselves to be more comfortable talking and thinking about death, we can become surprisingly more fluent in life’s love language.
Don’t be afraid of the end, it poisons the present moment.
Photo credit: “Life”: a Gu-shaped Vase, 2016, Stoneware with gold leaf in blues, Charles LaFond, Potter, 6″ by 30″, private museum collection.