I Don’t Know What I’m Doing!

Something that most people don’t know about me is I’m passionate about the performing arts.  I don’t know when I was first captivated by theater and dance, but when I began college in 1975, I was originally a theater major.  I never considered acting.  Instead, I was fascinated by the way plays gave voice to people’s experience and that dance dramatized emotion.  It probably helped that my first theater instructor had a love for substantive work, ranging from playwrights like Arthur Miller and Albert Camus.

Because Atlanta is a hub for performance (more movies are made in Atlanta than in any other North American city), I have the opportunity to see a new play almost every week.  One show recently resonated with me in a profound way.  It helped to crystallize something of my own experience.

The play, Knead, a one-person drama written and performed by Mary Lynn Owen, portrays the story of Ms. Owen’s life in Georgia as the child of a Cuban mother and a white American father.  Taking place in a kitchen, the actor attempts to recreate a loaf of bread as her mother would have made, based on a recipe in which her mother left out some ingredients. Through the process of working the dough, Owen shares the frustrations of the loss of culture, the loss of family members, and the loss of dreams.  As the story unfolds, the audience learns that her mother died at age 59.  In the play, the actor is also age 59.  In a moment of frustration, when the bread dough isn’t what it should be, while also talking about life’s many frustrations, the actor calls out, “I’m 59 and I don’t know what I’m doing!”

Over the last year, I’ve had conversations with several friends and colleagues.  Some of us are actively planning our retirements.  Others have retired and have moved to another stage of life.  The images of aging depicted in our culture bear little resemblance to the lives most “older adults” actually lead.  The transition to the next stage in life isn’t about doing nothing, giving up, and hanging in God’s waiting room for our eventual demise.  At the same time, something is very true which is left out of our image of older adulthood:  like any other life transition, we don’t know what we’re doing especially when we’re in the middle of it.  Yes, at this stage of my life, I have to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing.

There’s a youthful assumption that when one becomes an adult, one figures it out and knows what to do.  That’s really not the case.  Being older means one had experience.  It can often be the case that a person can extrapolate a way forward based on previous experience.  But most of the time, when faced with major transitions in life, we’re doing the best we can and hoping not to mess things up too much!

I’m fortunate to have friends who are in their 20’s.  It’s often refreshing to spend time with them.  It keeps me from getting stuck in narrow ways of thinking.  As I hear my younger friends talk about their futures, their hopes and hesitations seem much like my own.  They aren’t sure how things will work out, whether choices they make will be mistakes or they’ll be the right choices. Will they or can they achieve their dreams.  While my dreams are not as grand as they were when I was 20, what is essentially different for me at this age is that my experience gives me a sense of assurance that I’ll make it through tough times.  At this stage in my life, I know what I’ve already been through.  I know life can be painful and understand what that means.  I also know that pain in life generally doesn’t last and that I can make it through.  That means that I may not know what I’m doing today, but I have some confidence that I’ll make it through whatever comes my way.

“I don’t know what I’m doing!”  Truer words were never spoken.  Yet, admitting this truth, even in our older years, opens us to the possibility of experiencing life as an adventure.  We can never know for certain what will come our way next.  But we can be open to possibilities and, having lived through some tough times, know that whatever comes our way, we can make the best of it.  That gives me hope for the future.

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