With the crown of my head planted on the floor, my toes pointed heavenward and my torso swaying slightly, I took 50 deep, slow breaths. Then, I lowered myself–not as gracefully and with as much control as my yoga teacher would have it, but not crashing down, buttocks toppling and spine askew, as I had done two months before.
Then I said to myself, “I did it.”
After giving myself 12 months to do an unassisted headstand, I had met my goal. But I have achieved beyond a physical goal in finite time: I am discovering balance in mind and body. I am finding the place between strength and flexibility, between hard and soft, between fear and freedom, between risk and stagnation. Between life and death.
I am starting to develop an intimacy with this place. Sometimes, I call it 50-50. The term springs from the book I wrote, profiling people who created unique events to mark their 50th birthday.
That edge–that balance–emerged as the deepest theme that ran through all their stories. I hear from the subjects that they continue to seek this edge, that this edge is the essence of living itself. While the book took a snapshot of them at 50, the theme unfolds: We sway and teeter, and sometimes we crash, but we keep reaching for that balance.
The people in the book are acutely aware of being on the edge, of each moment containing the living and dying–50-50. The book tells the story of Ottoline Lyme, who gave birth to twins as a single mother at age 50, and e-mailed me recently about a new milestone–retirement. “Retirement feels like all the elastic in my underwear broke at once: My mother’s health is not good, I need a new car, new garbage grinder. Kindergarten issues take a lot of time; there’s swimming lessons and play dates, and thank goodness I have the time for it all right now. But it’s very busy and I haven’t yet carved out much time for myself, as I had hoped. That will come.”
There’s Ron Klein, who used his birthday to mark midpoint. He sent $50 to 50 friends, followed by a brutal 2,480-mile journey overland in Tibet to Mt. Kailash. Then, “I came back to start the back 50.” Since I interviewed him, Klein has kept sharpening the edge: He has trekked to other, treacherous outer reaches of the earth, and he has become a foster father to a Vietnamese college student in Japan, where he teaches.
And Howard Gourwitz, an attorney who auditioned successfully to play in the University of Michigan marching band to mark his 50th, said to me recently that his musical year confirmed this: “You’re never too old–or too young–to dream.”
Hope, joy, gratitude, generosity, humor and the awareness of the shadow mark their attitudes. Like Gourwitz, all are in touch with wonder, that quality innate to youthfulness.
I remember Deepak Chopra, the spiritual guru, telling me (and his observations became the introduction to my book): “Emotionally I feel a little more mature but I feel the same enthusiasm and wonder for my life as I felt at age 20.”
Standing on your head invites wonder. It also can be dangerous. At worst, you can break your neck. Good yogis teach the headstand carefully and spot you vigilantly as you go up and come down. On the other hand, when you come down from a headstand, an immense feeling of vigor and energy surges through you. The headstand is classified as a restorative pose, and is called “the king of all postures.” It also gives you a completely different perspective.
At age 50, I had given myself a three-week intensive certification training to teach yoga. Earlier that year, I had handed in the manuscript for “Turning 50” and, partly inspired by the stories I had collected, took off for California to a noted school and immersed myself in 160 hours of yoga in a spot of earth as near paradise as any place I’ve ever been.
When I left White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, I vowed to myself that within the year I would achieve the physical forms, or asanas, that I couldn’t quite master during training. I would do a backbend, complete the full one-and-a-half hour aerobic yoga workout and, of course, do the headstand. I got the first two pretty quickly. For the headstand I gave myself a year because that seemed far enough away and time enough to give up should I choose to.
My goals typified many of those in the stories I collected. There was Nelda Mercer, who ran the Honolulu Marathon; Peg Tappe, who earned certification as a scuba diver (she who had never seen the ocean until her late 40s); and Steve Watson, who traversed the country in a motorcycle odyssey.
These physical feats defied convention. They proved Chopra’s point, that middle age is “a social perception” and that “human aging is not a fixed phenomenon.”
And, as is the obvious observation, ours is the generation that refuses to age. People who have read the book come up and tell me that. Heck, I’ve said it myself in radio interviews. But it’s a shallow statement without meaning. In our youth-struck culture, everyone refuses to age, often with ugly consequences.
Rather than people who refuse to age, what I happened upon are stories of 50 people who accept that they have found the wellspring. Those who achieved landmark physical feats have metaphorically hacked their way to the fountain of youth. There they found no real fountain but instead touched the essence of youth, which was contained in the journey, not the destination.
Physical limits are movable. I, who had been a dancer, always avoided its gymnastic elements because I had built my own prison of fear, things that sound ridiculous when spoken out loud now: that a well-bred Chinese girl does not perform athletics; that I had no strength and didn’t want muscles; that my hips were too heavy to hoist; my forearms too skinny and shoulders narrow; that I couldn’t bear failing. That the risk was not worth it. Such are the social and familial messages we carry in our bodies until we are willing to become our authentic selves.
With such bars in place, I effectively locked the headstand out of my body and, even after setting my 12-month goal, struggled week after week, seemingly futilely, to achieve it.
And then one day, I found the point. Right away I recognized it: With my knees curled, I was on top of my head, steady. Unassisted. I began to straighten my legs, and still I stayed on my head. I reached for the sky with my toes and then I was there. The ease of it shocked me.
Oh, I teetered all right, and I thought my neck was going to crunch into a concrete block. But I shifted weight to my elbows, as I was taught. And my breath was soft. It wasn’t hard strength that got me up, it was softness.
Exhilaration swelled up side by side with the fear, and I looked it in the eye and fear faded.
“You’re never too old–or too young–to dream,” Howard Gourwitz had said. He wasn’t banging his fist on the table and shouting that 50 is young. He was saying that the universal quality of youth–of being fully and wondrously alive–flows through all ages at all times. At 5, 15 or 50 and beyond, one can be in touch with that source. Youthfulness, as Chopra said, means simply being connected to the source of creation itself.
On the other hand, even children at age 5 and 15 can be closed off from dreams and growth, like others who armor themselves. Yet many people who are gravely ill, or who have been near death, are connected to the essential quality of youth, as are those who care for them. Regardless of chronological age, they can strip off layers of expectations to become more authentic, more themselves, more joyful. Such people know the softness, the swaying vulnerability of living. They have found the courage to live.
There is nothing magical about 50, as many in the book say. It doesn’t confer instant wisdom, intuition and joy any more than it protects you from the storms of life. The slow illness or sudden death of a parent, or the startling truth of one’s own frail health can strike at random. But courage is what helped many of the subjects in the book live through their losses.
Was it courage that raised me into a headstand? So much goes on when you’re doing it: muscles to contract, others to stretch, bones to align, weight to shift. What I adjusted mechanically to make the difference between success and failure may be reduced physically to a one-degree tilt of my pelvis. What I adjusted in my inner self was similarly infinitesimal. And huge: I gave in to the unknown. Call it faith.
Once I’m up in the stand, I’m not as still as stone. But the truth is, no one is locked into a perfect headstand because, like all poses, it constantly adjusts and transforms to stay alive.To live is to be in that balance, to know you’re at 50-50 every moment.
Said Chopra, “If you are aware that the Prince of Death is stalking you, that every minute he’s closer, your life would be totally magical. Your priorities wouldn’t be trivial–they would be magnificent things.”
Check the Web at www.oliviawu.com, for more from “Turning 50.”
