Put Some Colour in your Life

                                           Put Some Colour in Your Life

Retirement is for most of us a difficult phase –more difficult in anticipation than in living it. I am no exception to it. I have been in a state of anxiety bordering on depression with just a few months to go for my retirement. You can call it the indigo mood, indigo being the colour of the deep midnight sky.  How would I spend the next twenty years-if not thirty years-doing nothing? As I sit in my room overlooking the colony road, I watch an old gentleman- maybe in his late eighties- going with confident strides on his morning walk to the neighbourhood park. He has slowed down in the last few years and has developed a slight tilt while walking. But he remains cheerful and greets everyone –and specially the children. His warmth is spontaneous as though everyone he meets is his son/ daughter or grandchild. When I look at his stooping shoulder, scrawny and feckled legs and hands, I cannot help wondering how he has a zest for living and living happily. When I am in my class in the midst of the 18+ students, I feel ancient, far removed from their dumb charades, their giggles, their slang and sms language. I feel acute embarrassment when I neither understand nor relate to their jokes, their references to MTV music and their technological skills.  

I met the old man when he was alone sitting in the park. He had done his two rounds and was starting on his pranayam. I sat next to him and without much ado asked him the secret of his cheer and composure. He said: “So,you want to know how I always behave with a certain sang froid.”  When I nodded in concurrence, he said that is how you had also behaved when you moved from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to adulthood, from the 30s to the 40s to the 50s and now to the 60s. I could not follow his line of thought and asked him to explain.

Do you remember Yeats’ poem  “Among the School children”, he asked me. I recalled my lectures  on Yeats and this was a very special poem I loved to teach. He asked me if I knew the V^th stanza and I recited the lines from memory:

                          What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
                          …………………………………………………………….
                          Would think her son, did she but see that shape
                          With sixty or more winters on its head,
                          A compensation for the pang of his birth,
                          Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Well, said the old Man, is not Yeats asking whether a mother would regret having her child if she could envision the child as a sixty-year-old scarecrow? Yeats projects an image of a young mother and asks:  “what if she could look forward and see her son as a withered old man? Would the pain and worry of child bearing be worth the result?” The old man wistfully smiled and said:  I think of my mother and would like her to feel that I continue to be her little darling despite looking withered and old so that she would be assured that the pain and worry of child bearing was all worth it. I was amazed that despite teaching this poem for so many years I had never associated myself with the image of an old woman who was once a precious little baby on my mother’s lap.

The old man had pointed out to me how all of us try to be worthy of the life given to us when we move from stage I to stage II to the next stage till we reach our retirement age . At every stage, we change track and we live through it with great zest and enthusiasm. Why not then accept old age as the inevitable last phase and live it in the same way. He smiled and said “ We had blue in our youth to open the flow of communication and  to broaden our youthful perspective in learning new information; green in our adulthood to symbolize nature, fertility, well being; red in our later maturity to symbolize action, confidence, courage, vitality. Now that you are old and about to retire, put some orange in your life to spice things up when you feel time is dragging, and you want to get more involved in life and get relief from anxiety and depression.

I returned home from the park with a spring in my walk and with a prayer to my mother for giving me this life.