Turning 3D

I turned 61 on Sunday.

According to my math-y friend Jim, 61 is “3D in hexadecimal.” He explained the math, but it meant nothing to me. (Jim is really smart as well as being a lovely human, but that’s not the point).

But the idea of “becoming 3D” captivated me.

I mean, obviously, I have been occupying the world as a multi-dimensional human most of my life. (Well, maybe not when I’m flattened on the couch with a cat on my chest). But 61 is some serious aging math. I got a free “seniors” bank account the other day. I’m deeply conscious of that secondary wave of rapid aging that study pointed to last year, and — like Sam and Mina and others on the blog — I’ve had some new physical depreciations show up in the past year that make me anxious about being able to move the way I want, inhabit my body with the freedom I take for granted.

So 3D. I started to play with what it might mean to twist the kaleidoscope a couple of turns to explore what life could be in if I bring new parts of me into focus, gently let others shift to the sides. Let the things that have been at my centre shed light on the middle, but not glow so much that I can’t see the edges.

Last year on my birthday, I woke up in a nunnery in Bhutan. I had been there briefly in 2018, and the sensation of it kept coming back, like the memorytaste of the best sushi I’d ever had. So I arranged my life to take six weeks off (one week for every decade), worked with Chador, my guide-friend, to make a plan to sleep in a place that doesn’t host westerners, and, the day before my birthday, rode a bike 30 kilometres up a mountain, climbing nearly two kilometres at Himalayan altitude.

It was sublime. I slept on the floor of the nuns’ little receiving room. I woke at dawn and watched the sun creep alive over the himalayas, watched one of the nuns build a fire and fan scented smoke up to the sky in a morning offering. Walked down the mountain with an ancient nun who was as fit as a goat, even though she came down with me so we could take her to the hospital for some ailment or other.

That moment epitomized some of the core dimensions I’ve lived my life with — yearning to be in something bigger, persistence (stubbornness?), a kind of fearlessness, independence, forging connections all over the globe, imagining something and pursuing it, a boundless (sometimes misplaced) trust that I could push my body into anything I want it to do.

When I think about some of the places I’ve woken up on my birthday, this Cate is the one I’ve centred. Puerto Natalas, Patagonia, after hiking the W trek (and losing all my toenails). Sarajevo, where I did 108 sun salutations and wandered gloomy, smoky streets feeling the trauma of civil war in the roses painted in the mortar shell scars on the sidewalks. Costa Rica, where I hiked in a rainforest and looked for tiny bats and frolicking monkeys.

That Cate is the same Cate that took me across dozens of countries on my bike, most often alone, into a two decade project in Uganda, into work that generates complex and challenging emotions. Life lived with a constant question of “what else is there to know and be with?”

The mountain in Bhutan was sublime. But I also skidded on the ice at the top of my ride and hurt my quad, and I got mild pulmonary edema. After I came down, I had the feeling that I wanted to come home, be in a less outward dimension, turn into myself in a new way.

The year that followed had a lot of moments that felt like the slow toil of climbing that mountain, the destabilizing seconds when I skidded on the ice, the searing ache of trying to squat over a latrine to pee when my glute was in spasm. Many people I love have been flung into wounding, unexpected situations. My own relationship ended in a painful slide that was disorienting, made me look at my centre and touch it gently, like a bruise. The world around us slid into chaos and a revelling in brutality, an exposure of craven selfishness.

I let my kaleidoscope drift, then actively shift. I went into a different centre, reaching back into history and my creative self. I started writing a novel inspired by one of my ancestors, who was the first woman in New France to be hanged — after she murdered her abusive son-in-law. (A lesson for our times). I discovered that turning my physical persistence toward imagining, shaping, sitting down and actually just being with the act of creation was much harder than anything physical I’ve ever done. Discipline without the dopamine reward of a hard ride or lifting something heavy.

In that space, I found a community. I’m not a joiner, but somehow, magically, my persistence in writing found five other women who are doing the same, and we meet every morning on zoom for an hour and write together. A new dimension, where I’m one of a group, not navigating the edge or facilitating it. I let myself receive.

In this pursuit of story, the DNA online lottery was benevolent, and I found a lost second cousin. An amazing person I see myself in. The truth of our family story was healing, connecting, openings.

In the edges of loss and upheaval around me, the core people I trust with my life — and who trust me with theirs — were reinforced over and over. And new ones emerged.

In those openings, I let the adventurous, pace-rabbit of a human part of me slide to the edges. Let myself feel what was in the middle. Touched it with my tongue, like a snowflake or mist from the sea. A desire for creativity. Generosity. Reciprocity. Community. Fresh air.

I’ve been idly toying with how I’m going to live the next part of my life for years. I want to work less, be somewhere I can ride and run and walk from my door, be by the sea. Vague ideas, no real plan, held in orbit here by work and my relationship and inertia. Then my friend Stephanie sent me a real estate listing in Lunenburg. “I think this might be your house,” she said.

It was. There’s a loft for writing and art and yoga. It’s five minutes walk to the wharf. A life to live in new colours.

So I’m moving to Nova Scotia. To a little red house that my writing group calls our clubhouse. To a space to create anew. And be with my aging, beautiful physical being in a space where I can breathe.

My very first post for this blog was a reflection on turning 50 and tending to my body so I could still be agile and adventurous when I was old. I read it now and it feels so … active. I’m learning that protecting the old lady inside me does mean movement, does mean stretching and physical balance. And it’s also about connection, and stillness, and community. A kind of movement that also honours sitting down and letting myself find joy from the inside out.

Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who is keenly aware and appreciative of the privilege of their life.