Michael E. Coughlin, printer and publisher, now in Cornucopia, Wisconsin, published a small 12 page booklet in 1988 by the title of GROWING, As a fellow member of the American Amateur Press Association (*), Mike and I have traded thoughts back and forth through the years and now I would like to extend that trading by presenting this booklet in this web site. Publishing booklets has become a signature work by Michael E. Coughlin. His booklets can be easily held in one hand to read as you wait for an appointment to materialize or parked in the car, again waiting. They are easily slipped into a pocket and retrieved for more entertainment later. Once you read this booklet you may see why it has been selected to be in the section called Personality Profiles. This appears here with Mike’s permission, of course.
+++++
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?”
Leroy “Satchel” Paige
+++++
THE HANG OF IT
Robert R. Updegraff
At about the age when many men begin to consider themselves crossing over to the shady side of life – the half-century mark, Sir Christopher Wren, who built magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the seventeenth century, was entering enthusiastically upon a career in a new profession. After serving as professor of astronomy at Gresham College and Oxford, he turned architect.
In the forty-one years after his forty-eighth birthday this amazing man executed fifty-three churches and cathedrals, most of which still stand as monuments to his greatness. Like the man James Whitcomb Riley wrote of who had “lived to three-score and ten and had the hang of it now and could do it again.” Sir Christopher discovered the secret of living a second life and doing another life’s work.
++++++
SHEDDING SHELLS
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Following quoted from a Gift From The Sea, published by Pantheon Books in 1955.
Perhaps middle age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego. Perhaps one can shed at this stage in life as one sheds in beach-living; one’s pride, one’s false ambitions, one’s mask, one’s armor. Was that armor not put on to protect one from the competitive world? If one ceases to compete, does one need it? Perhaps one can at last in middle age, if not earlier, be completely oneself. And what a liberation that would be!
It is true that the adventures of youth are less open to us. Most of us cannot, at this point, start a new career or raise a new family. Many of the physical, material and worldly ambitions are less attainable than they were twenty years ago. But is this not often a relief? “I no longer worry about being the belle of Newport,” a beautiful woman, who had become a talented artist, once said to me. And I always liked that Virginia Woolf hero who meets middle age admitting: “Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires…I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely. Certain things lie beyond my scope. I shall never understand the harder problems of philosophy. Rome is the limit of my traveling…I shall never see savages in Tahiti spearing fish by the light of a blazing cresset or a lion spring in the jungle or a naked man eating raw flesh…”
The primitive, physical, functional pattern of the morning of life, the active years before forty or fifty, is outlived. But there is still the afternoon opening up, which one can spend not in the feverish pace of the morning but in having time at last for those intellectual, cultural and spiritual activities that were pushed aside in the heat of the race. We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, overreaching and overstraining ourselves in the unnatural effort. We cannot compete with our sons and daughters. And what a struggle it is to race with these over-active and under-wise adults! In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon.
For is it not possible that middle age can be looked upon as a period of second flowering, second growth, even a kind of second adolescence? It is true that society in general does not help one accept this interpretation of the second half of life. And therefore this period of expanding is often tragically misunderstood. Many people never climb above the plateau of forty-to-fifty. The signs that presage growth, so similar, it seems to me, to those in early adolescence: discontent, restlessness, doubt, despair, longing, are interpreted falsely as signs of decay. In youth one does not as often misinterpret the signs; one accepts them, quite rightly, as growing pains. One takes them seriously, listens to them, follows where they lead. One is afraid. Naturally. Who is not afraid of pure space – that breath-taking empty space of an open door? But despite fear, one goes through to the room beyond.
But in middle age, because of the false assumption that it is a period of decline, one interprets these life-signs, paradoxically, as signs of approaching death. Instead of facing them, one runs away; one escapes – into depression, nervous breakdowns, drink, love affairs or frantic, thoughtless, fruitless over-work. Anything, rather than face them. Anything, rather than stand still and learn from them. One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.
Angels of annunciation of what? Of a new stage in living when, having shed many of the physical struggles, the worldly ambitions, the material encumbrances of active life, one might be free to fulfill the neglected side of one’s self. One might be free for growth of mind, heart and talent; free at last for spiritual growth…
*The American Amateur Press – if you have a yen for writing or publishing, take a few minutes and look over their website. The Wordwright has been a member of the AAPA for about twenty years.