There is something astounding and simultaneously humbling about turning 50. “Happy birthday to you,” sang my family and friends. A choir of cheerful voices counted: 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50! Big applause.
Fifty years. Five decades. Half a century. “You are old,” recited my children, almost in unison. “You are still young,” said those older friends and relatives who marked a similar milestone a couple of decades earlier.
I am both old and young, I think. Young and old, actually. Yes, young first. Fifty does not necessarily mean the end. It is just a reminder that I have walked many long roads for five decades.
Fifty is a great age to think about the most important gift God gave me: life. When we are children, life feels like a very long journey. As we grow older we soon realize that life actually is not long enough.
Most human beings do not last a century. Turning 50 intensifies the awareness that at this point, most likely, one has lived much of one’s human existence.
Sometimes I look at the last five decades of my life as if gazing through a time tunnel where I can see different versions of me learning and unlearning, finding and losing, searching and hiding, building and breaking. Here I am, at the end of that tunnel, shaped by all those moments.
Other times those 50 years seem more like a whiplash of experiences that fluctuate between joy and anxiety, companionship and loneliness, certainty and doubt, life and death, godliness and at times some godlessness. Here I am, again, the sum of those experiences.
As I contemplate the 50-year-old me, I do it with a sense of gratitude and a big smile. God has blessed me in many ways. I have made many mistakes and learned from them. I have accomplished what most people with the opportunities I have received can accomplish. I also carry a good share of regrets.
Being half-a-century old places me in a good position to share some wisdom. I have done many things sufficient times, in different ways and with a great variety of results, that I may share some advice.
It is the advice that comes from tripping over the same rock repeatedly or from repeating things so many times until something finally happens. It is the advice that once I heard from my parents, teachers, mentors and other elders, but did not make sense of until I lived five decades. Now I can say, “Ah, this is what they meant!” It is now my turn to share some of that advice mediated by my own experience.
Then there is the remaining future, not as long as the past five decades. Perhaps the last third of my life. I cannot see that future fully, but I can anticipate some of it. It is a time to harvest some of what I have planted. I plan, yet I do it cautiously since I am entering that time of my life in which I am in less control of what happens to me and what surrounds me.
At 50, I welcome the last part of my life with a sense of awe. It is the least I can do. Every bit of life is a reason to be grateful.
The next few decades will be a time to slow down and prepare for closures, retirement, handing things over and the natural losses that come as we age. A time to appreciate and enjoy the many young people who will outlast me. A time to renew my faith, give thanks for this life, and open myself more intentionally to the ever-nearing encounter with God in eternity.
Hosffman Ospino is professor of theology and religious education at Boston College.
