MEN

              It will be thirty years this June since I first enrolled in the men’s training weekend that has shaped my life in so many ways since then. I signed up despite the deeply buried, barely acknowledged fears and the intellectual objections that normally would have prevented me from attending an event that advertised itself as a “New Warrior Training Adventure.” “Warriors!” “Adventure!” Please! This was not something that appealed to my British genes and formal education, nor to my rather stiff academic self. But I remain immensely grateful that some mysterious instinctive wisdom prevailed and prodded me, against all probability, into signing up.

           I don’t know what I was expecting when I arrived (some two hours late! Expecting to be welcomed with sympathy for the terrible traffic that had held me up, I was put out, to say the least, to be “called onto the carpet” and held accountable for my tardiness). I was expecting some nice conference room discussion, I suppose, a polite seminar devoted to the challenges of being a conventional white male in a changing world—and one that insufficiently acknowledged my superior intellect and my ability to fix any problem that cropped up in my life, whether for myself or those around me. Which is not what I got. What I got myself into was a situation in which I was challenged in body, mind and spirit, challenged to question all the assumptions I had made thus far about my masculinity, which I’d defined, for the most part, by the imperious needs of one particular part of my anatomy. I was asked to connect with a part of my being that I had studiously ignored until that time: my heart. 

            Now, thirty years later, it is still my joy to join a monthly gathering of other men who, at some point in their lives, shared the experience of that weekend with me. We are all older now—not all as old as me, but men in their seventies and early eighties—for a Zoom session we call “conscious aging.” We are looking at the shared experience of growing old and learning how to do it with unabated though necessarily changing masculine energy. How to do it with gratitude and consciousness. These are all powerful men with whom I feel unquestioningly at ease, men whom I trust—indeed, have trusted—with my life. We have learned to listen to each other with full attention and compassion, and to speak with total authenticity. No topics are taboo, even the most intimate. In recent meetings we have been talking freely and in depth about ways in which our sexual lives must change with age, the ways in which we can find satisfaction for the familiar old urge when the equipment we are given to work with no longer functions in the same old pleasing way. There are ways and means of making love, we are each discovering in our own experience, that require skills other than those we used throughout our earlier lives. Touching, hugging, cuddling, tenderness, we are learning, can be “enough.”

            It’s a good feeling to know, quite simply, that I am not alone—in this or any of the other life changes we are experiencing in growing old.

            So these are the men who taught me—well, with whom I learned; there’s a difference—to make the kind of connection that engages my attention in this new project that I’m working on. Without them, I would not be writing, nor would I know how to write, the words I write today. Without them, I think, I might never have learned the deeper significance of what it means to love—to give as well as to receive it. 

            Such cause for gratitude, then. Such deep connection. Such love.