'On Thursday I turned 56. Growing older can propel a person to a deeply unsettling place'
'Passing through a dark emotional squall, I spent summer seeking to outrun doubts'
At a certain age, the most striking terrain illuminated by the glow of birthday cake candles can be that lonely gulch in which our greatest anxieties lurk.
Like a storm-battered ship, the hull of middle-age powdering on the jagged rocks of the advancing years, the tide of time relentless and omnipotent, this past week found your correspondent tossed as nature’s plaything toward that doleful harbour.
On Thursday, I turned 56. Hardly a leap onto Methuselah’s coat-tails, but, still, a number closer to 60 than 50 with all the unsettling connotations that accompany such a mathematical reality.
For weeks the tick-tock of the clock might have been the chilling two-note rhythm announcing the approaching shark in the movie Jaws.
Barack Obama was gone from the White House by 56, Jurgen Klopp left his Liverpool masterwork behind at the same age. At 56, Sinead O’Connor departed this world.
Absurdly, or otherwise, the accursed number loomed like a branding iron, a sell-by date to be flamed into my increasingly creviced brow.
Yet, if it is interweaved with jittery misgivings, this is, I’d like to think, ultimately a chronicle of hope, of the enduring power of the human spirit.
But let’s not sugar coat an undeniable truth. Growing older, particularly when the bedrock on which the better part of your world is constructed seems at the same time to tremble and quake, can propel a person to a deeply unsettling place.
By coincidence, my birthday this year fell on World Mental Health Day. And such serendipity prompted this jumble of confused thoughts. I hope it makes some sense.
Passing through a dark emotional squall, I spent summer seeking to outrun the kind of doubts that extract the last morsels of joy from the everyday.
Earlier this year, there was a wistful goodbye to a job that had shaped so much of my adult life, awakening both dormant insecurities and the terror that is imposter syndrome, day and night shadowed by the ogre of self-doubt. I was afraid.
Some reading this may know the feeling. A tsunami of changing technology has swept away the best laid plans of many Generation Xers who figured a chosen career path would see them to the end.
Even for those of us who have been blessed with a life of magical glitter, these moments have a capacity to bring the snarling beasts of panic and despair into the eyeline.
Through the long days, I frequently felt fretful, teary, assailed by pangs of uncertainty, cannon fodder against the heavy guns of mortality.
Some of it was a surrender to self-pity. Compared to those besieged by war or economic hardship, those who lie in hospital beds, the tens of millions with more urgent and authentic woes, my troubles were microscopic, the tiniest grain of sand.
It just didn’t feel that way. The sense, as I lost my footing, was of being swept along in the eye of Hurricane Milton’s angrier big brother.
Of being trapped in an untethered elevator clacking wildly down the floors of life.
Reflecting upon it now from an infinitely happier place, that career jolt and the way it unfolded swept me dangerously close to the badlands of depression.
For the first time in my life I felt antique and utterly helpless, the too-rapidly emptying hour glass prompting a bewildered query: Where have the years gone?
It felt like yesterday that I was invited, as “Ireland’s youngest sports journalist” to appear on RTE’s weekend kids’ programme Scratch Saturday.
Yet that was closing in on four decades hence, a bygone, Jurassic era when Charlie Haughey sat, like a Medici prince, on the Taoiseach’s throne, Bros and Glenn Medeiros were top of the pops, the Premier League was yet to be born and, Gay Byrne, the nation’s wise elder, was younger than I am now.
Like a bullet-train or a hypersonic missile, life hurtles by, a river in flood which, for those caught in the rapids, can feel as if it is advancing toward a sea of oblivion.
Lines from Thomas Kinsella’s poem, Mirror in February, echoed from that dusty backroom of the mind where schooldays’ memories endure.
“I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare, Riveted by a dark, exhausted eye, A dry downturning mouth.”
Long ago, excommunicated from the church of youth, middle-age disappearing into the murk, the job from which I extracted so much of my sense of self no longer offering a vital emotional guardrail, I spent a time peering nervously into the void.
I went out, I laughed and joked. But behind the mask, a sense of worthlessness and rejection was eating me raw. Crushing The effect of every little thing was magnified.
One day, a delightful young lady stood to offer an older man her seat on the bus. I looked over my shoulder to see if I was in his way. It took me a while to compute that I was the target of her kindness. It was a lovely gesture and a crushing moment.
Then, when I least expected, the weather of life magnificently altered.
As with Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey in Frank Capra’s timeless masterpiece, along came a guardian angel to shake me from melancholy.
To offer a reminder that, yes, it truly is a wonderful life.
At a funeral of a woman much younger than myself, a moving eulogy outlined how, in impossibly difficult circumstances, she had extracted the maximum from every day.
Though grievously sick, she somehow declined, right until the final hours, to stop living.
This will probably sound daft, but I felt like she was whispering in my ear from her sealed casket. Reminding me of life’s beauty, the stories yet to be written, demanding my heart do what hers no longer could...beat on.
It was the most important conversation I had this year.
Later that week, I happened upon a months’ old interview with Meath’s All-Ireland winning manager, Sean Boylan. To mark his 80th birthday, the dean of the Royal County sat down for a detailed chat with my friend, Colm Keys.
Sean is a quarter century my senior, yet philosophically forever young, a creature who bathes every road he walks in sunshine.
Even when ambushed in quick succession by cancer, Covid and pneumonia, months that “terrified” him, his insatiable appetite for living, his sheer joy at being, his determination to walk on could not — would not — be dimmed.
As he said: “You realise what counts and what doesn’t count. It’s a different respect for life.”
An audit of my own circumstances confirmed that any slivers of darkness were nothing next to the blinding light of good fortune. Surrounded by special people, the oxygen of love abundant, blessed with the health to embrace a world of infinite possibility.
Yesterday, my wife and the 56-and-a-day-old buffoon who still gasps with disbelieving astonishment at the miracle of such a kind, tolerant and beautiful soul at his cranky side, enjoyed a special birthday lunch.
Closer to 60 than 50, I raised a glass of sincere gratitude and, for a birthday toast, borrowed a few more words from Kinsella: “Not young, and not renewable, but man.”
Sign up to the Irish Mirror's daily newsletter here and get breaking news and top stories direct to your inbox.
Related
Share this page
Guest Posts by Easy Branches
