Yep, today's the day. My advent into this world occurred on Thursday, November 15, 1961 - a birthday incidentally I share with such luminaries as William Pitt, Judge Joseph Wapner, and Georgia O'Keefe - at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland...thus insuring I would be an Oriole fan forever, amongst other things.
There are lots of feelings as I enter the second half-centruy of my life. But they are all set against the following. This encouraging essay from the mentor I've never met, Dr. F. W. Boreham, has really meant a lot to me. Maybe it will to you as well.
Life at Fifty
By
F. W. Boreham
At cricket today I found myself sitting next to a man whose company I have often enjoyed and whose enthusiasm for the game is beyond question. But this afternoon, on making some observation about the play and receiving no reply, I glanced sideways and was astonished to find my companion in a kind of brown study. I remarked upon his unwonted distraction. He laughed.
“Well, to tell the whole truth,” he replied, “this happens to be my fiftieth birthday and I was wondering if I ought to spend the day in festivity or in lamentation!”
I unhesitatingly congratulated him. A man’s fiftieth birthday, Lafcadio Hearn once declared, represents life’s crowning climacteric: on that day he enters the gates of a new world. As to whether that new world is a richer world or a poorer one the amiable journalist did not specifically state. He contented himself with the affirmation that it would be a different one. In point of fact we seldom enter upon a fresh experience without discovering that the change has involved us in a few drawbacks and deprivations as well as in some distinct advantages. The step that a man takes on his fiftieth birthday is no exception to this rule.
In one of his racy essays, Mr. Robertson Scott tells how he caught sight of his fiftieth milestone some time before he actually reached it. “In the tram one evening about six months ago, a school-boy rose and offered me his seat,” he tells us. The incident startled him. A man who is still in the forties does not expect to have such courtesies thrust upon him. He consoled himself, however, with the easy assumption that, in all probability, the attentive youngster was a boy scout who had suddenly realised that the day was closing in without his having done the good deed prescribed for each twenty-four hours in the life of the perfect Baden-Powellite. Four months later, however, the same thing happened again, and then, shortly after, came the fiftieth birthday. Looking back upon this arresting sequence of happenings, the genial essayist found them intensely suggestive.
I
Now the striking thing about Mr. Robertson Scott’s experience is the fact that his attainment of his jubilee evidently appealed to him not as an end; but as a beginning. It was not so much a premonition of senility and decay as the entrance upon an entirely fresh and entirely novel phase of human life. He literally greeted the unseen with a cheer.
When Horace Walpole wrote to Thomas Gray in 1566, urging him to write more poetry, the author of the Elegy replied that when a man has turned fifty—as he himself had just done—there is nothing for it but to think of finishing. In those words he undoubtedly voiced the general feeling of the period. In the eighteenth century a man of fifty was classified among the veterans. A hundred years later a very different conviction held the field. Tolstoy tells us that his fiftieth year was the year of his greatest awakening and enlightenment; and, in the Poet at the Breakfast Table, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes makes the old master witness to something of a similar kind.
His friends are anxious to know how and when he acquired such wisdom, and he is able to reply with remarkable precision: “It was on the morning of my fiftieth birthday that the solution of life’s great problem came to me with a few grand but obvious inferences. It took me just fifty years to find my place in the Eternal Order of Things.” Such testimonies, it will be recognised, go a long way towards vindicating the assumption that the fiftieth birthday marks rather a new beginning than a sad regretful close. It is true, of course, that a man of fifty has left the greater part of his life behind him. He may be pardoned if he pauses at times to take long and wistful glances along the road that he has trodden. It will not be considered strange if he drops, on very slight provocation, into reflective reminiscence.
But it is also true that a new world stretches out before him. He is still upon the threshold of things, and, if he be spared to enjoy octogenarian honours, he will smile as he recalls the immaturity and incompleteness of life’s first five decades. To have finished at fifty would have been to have missed the best.
II
I have been reading the Life of John Drinkwater. On attaining his fiftieth birthday, Drinkwater penned a page or two of admonitory and encouraging remarks for the delectation of others who were approaching, perhaps with some misgiving, that mature age. Mr. Drinkwater’s observations gather force from the fact that a year or two after he made them he suddenly passed away. The picture of masculine vitality, he attended the Oxford and Cambridge boat race; entertained some members of the crews; waved his hand laughingly to the company as he left; took a taxi to his home; went to bed and died in his sleep. John Drinkwater regarded a man’s fiftieth birthday as a mountain-peak of outstanding importance. There is a time when a peach, being ripe, proceeds to sweeten: at fifty a man reaches that stage. But the phase has its dangers. At fifty the average man finds himself treated for the first time as a back number—a representative of a generation that is being left behind. Unless he is careful, a man of fifty will gradually absorb into his own sub-consciousness this unflattering estimate, secretly accepting it as a just reflection on his waning powers. Mr. Drinkwater called upon such men to scout the insult as pure nonsense. A man of fifty, Mr. Drinkwater argued, should be as sharp in his wits as at any time of his life, and as robust, if not as athletic, in his energies. Intellectually, he should be in the full exercise of his powers, and his imagination, if he ever had any, should be working, if with less facility, more profoundly than ever before. Something of life’s earlier profusion may have gone, but he should, if he does justice to his years, bring a finer zest to the enjoyment of all that has not been disregarded by his selective instinct. Mr. Drinkwater did not actually say it, but he evidently regarded a man’s fiftieth birthday as a day on which that man should make a fresh beginning. It may mark the decline of some of his powers, but those powers are the least important and the least vital. By fifty, his best faculties have been brought to mellow maturity in the school of hard knocks. The qualities which are most distinctively his own, and which, following the dictates of taste and temperament, he has most studiously and persistently developed, will be at their climax and their zenith. At these points, he is at his best; and the very fact that he is at his best challenges him to a supreme endeavour.
III
Now this is very gratifying as far as it goes. It is certainly gratifying to the man of fifty. And, generally speaking, it is all true, although some slight modification must, of necessity, be made. It is doubtful, for example, whether the critical faculties of many men survive, in their meridian splendour, to the fiftieth year. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table would have endorsed this reservation. He held that men of fifty are poor critics. They are conscious, it may be, that earlier in life their criticisms were too caustic, so now they go to the opposite extreme and make them too kind. Men of fifty, the Autocrat held, are too prodigal of praise. He attributed it to the elimination of ambition. “At thirty,” he says, “we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of life. Twenty years later we have done so or have shut up our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our way.” “The consequence is,” he continues, “that like peaches or pears, we grow sweet a little while before we begin to decay,” and he concludes by announcing bluntly his contempt for the fair words of any critic over fifty.
Mr. Robertson Scott noticed something of the same kind, but he attributed it to other reasons and expressed it in other terms. He thinks that men grow more contented, and therefore more considerate, at fifty, but he puts it down to their having become more prosaic and matter-of-fact; they have learned by that time to take things as they find them. Their vision is less blurred by pride and by passion. “If,” says Mr. Robertson Scott, “a man has anything in him at all, he feels wonderfully workish at fifty. For one reason, a lot of distractions have been cut out of life. He has found ways of seeing the wood in spite of the trees. His sense of perspective, which, when it is at fault, is the source of most of our troubles, has been developed. Trumperies no longer cumber so greatly one’s relation with realities, one may be grimmer, but one is essentially happier. There are bitter draughts to be taken constantly; but one knows that they can be got down. As one has grown more charitable in one’s interpretation of other people’s actions, other people seem to have become kinder in their views of one’s own.” Thus Mr. Robertson Scott falls into line with the Autocrat. He, too, recognises that, like the peaches and the pears, we sweeten before we begin to decay; but as to whether the process of sweetening is to be regarded as the climax of the process of ripening, or as the inauguration of the process of decay, this is a point so fine and so delicate that it can only be determined by that sage wisdom and that ample charity which, by general consent, come only with the years.
IV
Dr. Chalmers used to say that our allotted span of three-score-years-and-ten divides itself into seven decades corresponding with the seven days of the week. That being so, it follows that the sixth decade—the period that opens to a man on his fiftieth birthday—is the Saturday of life. Like the Saturday of childhood’s care-free days, and, like the Saturday of riper years, it has characteristics peculiarly its own. It is not a time for folding the hands and reclining at ease. On the contrary, Saturday morning is, to most people, more insistent than any other morning in its demands upon their energies. And as to Saturday afternoon, let a man walk up the street and he will see many of his neighbours garbed and employed as they are never garbed or employed on any other day. On Saturday we weed the garden, mow the lawn and affect the week’s repairs. On Saturday we attend to a multitude of minor matters for which we have previously had no time. On Saturday we clear up. And on Saturday night we are tired. It by no means follows, therefore, that because a man’s fiftieth birthday is his Saturday morning, his week’s work is done. At that stage of his career he will, if he be wise, glance around him, asking himself a number of Saturday questions. Are there any tasks and duties that, in fighting his way through the world, he has overlooked and neglected? He will, on that Saturday morning of his, survey life as a whole and see that things are in their places.
It is a curious and significant coincidence that, when Dr. Samuel Johnson was approaching his fiftieth birthday—the Saturday morning of his life—he reviewed his methods of living with a view to effecting any reforms and amendments that seemed desirable. As a result of that analysis and overhaul, he drew up a series of resolutions, the first of which was that he would thenceforth go to bed early on Saturday nights. It would be interesting to follow the train of thought by which the great doctor came, at that stage of his distinguished career, to recognize a new and ethical significance in the character of his Saturdays. He evidently felt that Sunday can easily be spoiled before its dawn, just as any period of life may be compromised and prejudiced by the misdemeanours and indiscretions of the period preceding it.
Dr. Johnson made up his mind that Saturday, so far from unfitting him for Sunday, should lead up to it as a stately avenue leads up to a noble entrance-hall. Exactly a hundred years after the great doctor had inscribed this famous entry on the pages of his Journal, Charlotte Elliot wrote her well-known hymn in praise of Saturday:
Before the Majesty of heaven
Tomorrow we appear;
No honour half so great is given
Throughout man’s sojourn here.
The altar must be cleansed today
Meet for the offered lamb;
The wood in order we must lay,
And wait tomorrow’s flame.
People of fifty, saluting the Saturday morning of life, will do well to take good heed.
F. W. Boreham, ‘On Being Fifty’, Australian Baptist, 7 November, 1939.
