Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Lucky Gold, 75, brightened a difficult week by reminding us what small-town life in America was like when he was growing up. This week, Diana Nyad, 76, writes about wrestling with the hands of time.
In this country, we seem to assign great significance to our birthdays. Yet, all along, what more is there to do—at any age, on any given day—than to rise to seize your dreams, to reach for your best self, to face your hardships, to connect with your loved ones, to relish your adventures?
Nevertheless, today, at 76, I can’t pretend aging is not on my mind. Perhaps today, I have something to add to the American conversation, the American fixation, on aging.
It’s not the number that alarms me. What chokes me is the stunningly rapid passage of time. I have all my life, even as a child, been at the edge of panic about life zipping by with no controls to slow it down. I was struck as a kid at the scene from a 1923 silent film in which actor Harold Lloyd clung to the hands of a giant clock, dangerously high above the streets of New York City, desperately trying to wrestle with the hands of time. I keep my eye on the clock all night long, awakening for a moment to see that it’s now 2:44 a.m., now 3:58 a.m. In a sense, I’ve been wrestling those clock hands myself.
I am admittedly functioning under a lifelong state of sleep deprivation, staying up quite late and getting up before dawn, obsessed to capture every possible waking hour. Perhaps that is why I doze in my car at red lights in the afternoon. (Don’t drive with me!) What is it, exactly, that I’m afraid of? It’s not death.
I swam from Havana to Key West at the age of 64, and that crossing gave my closest friends and family reason to fear for my life—but I felt that I had to do it. Just as the extreme alpine climbers must justify their potential death on the highest peaks to their loved ones, I had to make believers out of those who worried for me way out in that epic ocean, without a shark cage. But whether we are to die embroiled in the wrath of the open seas or otherwise, the contract is understood. We are, all of us, going to die. The question is: How will we look back at the hours, the days, the years, under the pressured realization that we can never live any of those days over again?
