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“At 50,” Confucius wrote, “I knew the will of heaven,” that is, heaven's purpose for his life. I don't claim equality with Confucius, but we're under the same heaven, and I know what he meant.
At 51, I'm sure of fewer things than when I was 21, but the things I am sure of are the ones I need most. I know what the moral force of the universe expects from me and the role I must play in the world.
I'd like younger people to know how liberating this is. It allows me, for example, to maintain my trans allyship in the face of abuse and harassment. This is sometimes described as courage, but I don't think that's right. It's simply assurance that I'm following heaven's will for me, and no other will can override it.
(By the way, it's not just Confucianism that attaches this importance to the age of 50. “You are not yet 50,” the perplexed crowds say to Jesus in John's gospel, “and you have seen Abraham?” Presumably after age 50, seeing Abraham is no big deal.)
The thing is, I never looked for the will of heaven in all those years of propping myself up with goals, schedules, resolutions, secondhand principles. The knowledge came to me as a gift, and everything else fell into place. It was like when I struggle with a poem for weeks and the right line suddenly comes to me. It seems obvious, and all my false starts seem laughable, yet somehow I know I needed them to get to this point.
Still, if I could, I'd tell my past self not to bother with scaffolding. A life can only be built from within.
*****
I often have the uncomfortable experience of speaking to people who are, at most, 15 years older than me, but clearly think I'm much younger. “Of course, you'd prefer to be in a group with younger people,” they'll say. Or, “I'm suffering with menopause, but you're too young to know anything about that.” Correcting them seems impolite.
I've noticed that the gloomier someone's outlook on the world is, the likelier they are to do this. Perhaps it's strange for me to call others gloomy when I've had depressive episodes since childhood, and considering the horrors that now surround us. But there's a certain grey view of life – not sadness or righteous anger, just an assumption that the world is drab and vaguely hostile and unlikely to hold anything worth searching for – that I think I've managed to avoid.
Have these people also found heaven's will, I wonder?
*****
As a child I never thought of myself as a child. At best I acted out the part of a child. Not just any child, of course; perhaps the hero of one of the books where I'd learned to take refuge.
A few years ago I told a therapist some details of my early life, and he responded, “But surely, as a little girl …” It was like being told I'd been holding a picture upside down.
When I was 12, I showed a classmate a scratch on my hand from where my mother had dragged me down the stairs. She fell silent, then asked in a whisper, “Has anything like that happened before?” I could see her brain working, wondering what to do, and I knew I had given her something too big for our world.
For decades, I remembered that confused and anxious girl as the picture of a child burdened with more than she should be expected to handle. And then one day I remembered what she had been reacting to.
Perhaps it was only by seeing myself as a child that I could finally grow.
*****
In modern Japanese, 歳 appears almost exclusively as a suffix after a number, and means “years old.” Because writing its 13 strokes is time-consuming, it's often replaced by 才, which is pronounced the same way, “sai,” but means “ability.”
Since I began learning Japanese, I often have the startling experience of listening to familiar recordings and understanding them for the first time. An example is this live recording of Fukuyama Masaharu's song 18 - Eighteen - from his album Double Encore. In the stage patter afterward, he says 十八歳, “juhassai.” This means “18 years old” and is pretty much what I'd expect him to say, but it brought tears to my eyes when I first understood it.
Here's a live video of him performing the same song, just because it's cute when he hugs his guitar.
My poem Isaac depicts that patriarch on his deathbed, thinking back to the time when Abraham tried to sacrifice him and contemplating the idea that they will soon be reunited. I didn't consciously model it on Leonard Cohen's song The Story of Isaac, which is written from the perspective of Isaac as a child, but now I like to think of it as a sequel. Both works use puns on Biblical Hebrew, although I've forgotten much of my Hebrew since writing the poem.
I'm grateful to my Bluesky friend and fellow Fukuyama fan Ash for bringing the Confucius quote to my attention.