Precocious by Lucky

I used to joke, about being an elder. “Chronologically I’m an infant elder, but experientially I’m precocious.” I still say it sometimes, because it still feels true. But now, when I say it, I’m not joking, and I’m not exactly sure how I feel about being this way. I looked up the word precocious to see what it meant, and if I was using the word right. The word refers to someone who is “ahead of their time.” I don’t know how this applies to a senior citizen, but it does seem like there is a way that I seem to be ahead of my own development. I don’t actually know how to write, or even think about that, but I feel like I have to try. I don’t exactly know why. I tend to think it is presumptuous. It seems to me to be more than a little precocious to write about being precocious.

Officially someone who is precocious is supposed to be more developed than their age. I guess that is true of me. I don’t think it is something I sought out, or feel like I can take any credit for. Somehow the Great Mystery deemed that I had to go through a long period of being perched on death’s doorstep, so I could be brought back, through no efforts I was capable of, with a form of consciousness that reminds me daily how powerless I am in life. If I am really in any way precocious it is because I know this life is not my life, but Life’s life. That isn’t the kind of knowing anyone seeks, especially if it means being held close to death.

I sometimes think being precocious, in the way I seem to be, is a gift. I get to feel a lot of things. Sometimes I can make this awareness useful. I get inspired and just feel awe. At other times I think of this awareness as a curse. I have to feel things I would rather not. I can’t always make useful what besieges me. I feel happy when I am able to serve my community through this awareness. At other times I just feel grief, because I know no way to digest, and make palatable, what assails me. I alternately feel deeply embedded in the whole, and desperately alone, and drowning in an immense emptiness.  So far, it looks like both are real, they seem to coexist, and I have to travel through them.

Being precocious is not my doing. I know it. Life made me this way. I remember telling the doctor I had at Stanford, that I always wanted to be special, but when he told me that they (the doctors) had never seen a condition like mine, and didn’t know how to treat me, then I realized I was special in away I had never anticipated. I feel the same way now. I am precocious not the way I want, but in some way that Life wants.

I am simultaneously thrilled to be called in this way and horrified that it means in some way that I am a freak — a freak of nature. Being disabled is freakish enough, but being strangely enabled is really freaky. I am not writing these words, doing this exploration, to complain.  I’m doing it to genuinely wonder what my being is doing here, how does it serve that I am like this? I fear that I am a freak, some natural anomaly, but secretly I think that actually I am the exception that proves the point. I believe the feelings that assail me, feelings of incredible connection, are part of what it means to be fully human. I believe that a kind of emotional intelligence about ourselves, and each other, is part of our natural inheritance. I think I am twisted in this way to serve to remind us all of this aspect of who we are. In that sense, I’m not an anomaly, only a reminder.

Precociousness then is a memory aid. For a time, some people have forgotten what they are capable of.  The arc of human development includes an emotional awareness of the fact that we exist because something, something big and mysterious, has employed Life to make sure we exist. I’m grateful that I get to know this much, I tend to think the crazy reality we live in has lulled us to sleep, to fearfully forget what we already know.

I don’t know what anyone’s purpose is for being here. But, I do know that there is a purpose —a scouting mission to the edge — and that each life is precious, because that mystery is embedded in it. Being precocious is a tolerable inconvenience compared to that kind of awareness.

I founder, in a very human way, under the weight of what is being asked of me. I live in constant admiration of how others have shouldered their own weights, and I take hope that I can handle mine, because others let me see what they struggle with. If I am precocious its only to remind us all that we have passed this way before —it is within us, to know why we are here.