The Gray

For as long as I can remember I have always had a desire to be older.  Maybe it comes from my tendency to avoid the present, or maybe it is a desire for what I view to be simpler times ahead.  Either way, I often think about what my life might be like 30 to 40 years from now.

Turning another year older over the weekend brought me physically closer to this reality, and yet, it hasn’t extinguished the desire.  In some ways celebrating my birthday has only further ignited my desire for simplicity.

A desire to be at peace within the gray.

If we pay attention to our soul, growing older forces us to confront our ways of thinking and being.  It can be living hell, but it is necessary.  And it is for the good.

“You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds”

-St.Thomas More

One of the many things that needed to be confronted within me was my attachment to viewing the world in terms of black and white.  In terms of either/or.  Although this way of seeing the world is necessary for the first stage of life, as it forms essential boundaries and a solid foundation to live from, it becomes less helpful in the second stage of life…maybe even detrimental.

Recently, Pope Francis spoke to some young priests about the importance of teaching discernment so that they are able to better cope with life’s “gray situations”.  He went on to say that not only priests but lay people need to be taught as well, because:

“in life, not everything is black over white or white over black. No! The shades of gray prevail in life. We must teach them to discern in this gray area.”

This gray area.

This area where we attempt to take the concrete virtues that we learn when we are young and apply them once more to our lives that are rocky and unpredictable.  This area where the new things that we discover about ourselves and the world we in fact already knew years ago, but now are able to penetrate deeper into the same ideas with new experiences.

Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.

-Thomas Merton

The gray area is the area where our pasts, our insecurities, our good times, our tough times, and the unpredictable times of the present get discerned and flushed out through our words and actions.  This might take hours, days, months, years, or a lifetime.  But it is the area in which we live, therefore the area in which we need mercy.

For instance, we are told to love others as ourselves.  Yet we live in a world where we don’t really love our authentic selves so how can we, therefore, love others in the same capacity?  We are told to be good fathers and mothers yet for many new parents they don’t know what that means because they themselves never knew their own mothers or fathers.  In the age of social media when the projection of perfection is everywhere and we ridicule those who are not perfect in the way we want to see our own black and white lives (our perfect children, perfect families, perfect marriages, perfect religion, perfect political parties etc…) we leave ourselves open to be crushed.  Crushed by the pressures of ideals and perfection that is not our reality.  So when we finally do put our phones down or turn off the computer we are left with only our own lives.  Lives that aren’t perfect.  Lives that are steeped in the gray.

They say with age comes wisdom.  And maybe this is what I yearn for.  A time when the gray area is accepted and lived from with joy.

A simpler time when I might even see a bright light through the gray.

(*Pictures taken from Brienzer Rothorn Mountain of the Emmental Alps in Switzerland)