Somewhere between vanity and chemistry, between self-image and surrender, a new tutor has laid its hand upon me. Its name is Old Age. Strange, old age. Strange because it arrives with an echo of another threshold — that bewildering hour when we first realized we had entered puberty. Then too, the body was becoming unfamiliar territory. Then too, we sensed life altering itself beneath the skin, energy budding in ways we could not yet explain. One season announced arrival through acceleration. The other through dimming light.

Now, well into my late seventies, I find myself standing in that latter country.

For more than a decade I have considered writing about aging and wisdom, but each time the thought arose, I dismissed it with an honest shrug. I did not yet understand either one well enough, and so the can kept rolling farther down the road.

 
But now I am putting my cargo shorts on backward and strolling through the morning with confidence, entirely unaware of the mutiny in my wardrobe. Depth of understanding or not, the hour for writing has apparently arrived. If not wisdom, then at least witness. If not conclusions, then confession.

As a writer and musician, I have always depended on inspiration like a man depends on weather, hoping the skies would open at the appointed hour. For years I resolved to be inspired every morning by nine o’clock, as though the soul might be trained like a hunting dog. And for a long time, somehow, it worked.

But after many decades, the machinery has slowed.

Motivation does not come with the same urgency. Inspiration no longer appears on command. The old impulse toward creation, once so insistent, now lingers at a distance, as if calling from the far side of a field. Something in me has changed.

And yet I remain, in the main, a happy man. Content. Energized. Grateful for my life. Honest enough, though, to admit that my light is beginning to dim. That is the best language I have for it. Not despair. Not defeat. Simply the unmistakable softening of the lamp as evening approaches.

We do not age in a neat and orderly line. Life does not recede like a ruler measured inch by inch. It moves in sudden tides, molecular upheavals, seasons of rapid alteration. Science tells us that some of those surges arrive around ages thirty-four, sixty, and seventy-eight. I am nearing that last frontier now, and this time I can feel the gears shifting.

I have generally felt fortunate in the matter of health — electrocution, dismemberments, and a more recent diagnosis of vertigo notwithstanding. By grace, I was a young seventy-five, a young seventy-six. I followed the protocols. Took the vitamins. Said the prayers. Hulk Hogan himself might have nodded in approval.

“Adapt and Overcome” has long been my borrowed banner.

But there comes a season when the things that once called your name from every corner of existence begin, quite suddenly, to lose their voice. Passions that once burned like a forge become coals, then warmth, then memory. It is no small thing to wake and find yourself indifferent to what formerly drove you with holy impatience. In truth, the only reason I have sat down to write this at all is because I am trying to understand this new interior weather. I have always thought better with a page in front of me.

 
Old age isn’t about quitting. It is not surrender, not collapse, not some passing mood of discouragement. It is not cured by another bottle of supplements or ten more repetitions in the gym. There comes a moment when all the old allies — discipline, moxie, grit, stubbornness, self-motivation — can no longer keep pace with the body’s quiet unraveling. Tissue declines. Systems slow. The flesh obeys its own ancient law.

And then, if grace is kind, the soul learns not panic but acceptance.

The day is dimming, yes, but dimming is not the same as darkness. There is beauty in late light. There is peace in the long slant of evening. Eventually, our river goes where it will, and the soul, no longer thrashing at the current, discovers the deep joy of simply holding on for the rest of the ride.

My dear friend Glenn Schwartz — a musician of extraordinary renown — once told me that if he did not get to preach, he would not play guitar at all. He no longer cared about the music for its own sake. At the time, I could not comprehend it. How could a man so gifted, a guitarist whose fingers seemed to throw sparks, whose playing had inspired men like Joe Walsh and Dan Auerbach, arrive at such a place? Fire and joy had poured from his hands. Surely, I thought, this was only a passing cloud.

But it was not a passing cloud.

And neither was he.

I think, now, that I finally understand.

These awakenings come like flashes of clean lightning. The mind surveys the mounting evidence, takes stock of the changed landscape, and, interestingly enough, does not grieve the news. It simply sees. The change is observed the way one watches a storm move across distant fields: it comes, it goes, and we do not need to take either event personally. We marvel. We settle. We become pilgrims again.

There is a deep contentment in these calming years.