MUSINGS AT FIFTY

Waipa Post, Volume 45, Issue 3212, 4 August 1932, Page 3

MUSINGS AT FIFTY

" My fiftieth birthday was a solid gloom. I sat and moaned my lost youth, and thought with melancholy how more than half the strange journey of my life on earth was over, and I surmised that the remaining years left for me were to be in 'the sere and yellow leaf.' Well, nothing of the kind happened," writes Dr Rufus M. Jones in the Friend. " If anything, the leaves have grown less sere and yellow. The cumulation of experience and the increase of friendships have more than made up for the slowed-down pace in walking and for the wrinkles that time has added.

" I can see more clearly than I used to see that bodies inevitably wear out and run down, and there seems to be no way to wind them up for a new period; but, strangely enough, I have lost all desire to be re-wound. I have been getting more and more interested in that part of me that does not run down.

" There has been a growing evidence slowly coming into sight that something about me overtops and overbrims the body, and that ' something ' keeps getting more significant as the body adds its ring of years. "It is simply impossible in a universe of order that the gains of character and the accumulations of spiritual wealth are lost. ' Conservation ' is written all over the face of the universe, and it cannot be that there is no way in God's great world to ' conserve personality,' which is the crown and summit of the whole creation. I at least have gained an unshaken confidence in the Pilot who is steering the course of things, and I am quite serene to go on growing old believing that

"' The Port well worth the cruise is \ near, And every wave is charmed.' "Whittier had not lost a birthday, but was enjoying one, when he wrote his noble words:

" ' And so the shadows fall apart, And so the west winds play, And all the windows of my heart I open to the day.' "