I Don’t Want to Have Just Visited This World

Sometimes a beautiful and unexpected path begins with something as ordinary as clicking on an email.

A couple of weeks ago, an email from Grateful Living landed in my inbox inviting me to an online workshop called Grateful Aging: The Wisdom of New Beginnings. At 57, the subject of aging interests me for more than one reason. I am thinking about my own journey and the years I hope are still ahead of me, but I am also watching my parents grow older and thinking about what it means to remain engaged with life—to continue finding purpose, connection, curiosity, and joy even as our bodies and circumstances change.

The description of the workshop caught my attention because it didn’t deny the realities of aging. There can be doctor appointments, changes, limitations, and loss, but there can also be growth, vibrancy, purpose, and new beginnings. I liked the idea of exploring what makes us come alive in whatever season of life we happen to be in, so I paid my $25 and signed up.

Then I did what I often do when something makes me curious. I started poking around.

Inside the Grateful Living community, I discovered a section called Tuesday Treats, a collection of videos, essays, poems, songs, and other offerings. One of the videos caught my attention, so I clicked. That small act of curiosity introduced me to a 95-year-old woman named Dot Fisher-Smith and sent me down one of those wonderful rabbit holes where one discovery leads to another and you end up somewhere you never expected to go.

Dot was filmed by Justine and Michael of Reflections of Life in Ashland, Oregon, a place I already love. I have visited Ashland many times over the years to attend plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, wander through the cute downtown shops, walk through beautiful Lithia Park, and eat at the outdoor cafés along the creek. It has always felt like a creative, interesting place to me, so there was something especially lovely about discovering Dot there.

Eleven seconds into the film, she announces, “I’m 95. Actually, I’m halfway through my 96th year.” I liked her immediately.

As the film unfolds, though, it becomes clear that Dot isn’t interested in offering some shiny version of aging in which a positive attitude makes the difficult parts disappear. Asked what she loves most about being in her body now, she says she is grateful that she can still breathe easily and that she is happy for what she has, while also acknowledging that more limitations are on the way and more mobility will eventually be lost. She knows where she is in the arc of her life.

Then she says the words that have stayed with me ever since:

“I don’t want to have just visited this world.”

Neither do I.

Dot talks about having had an unhappy childhood, about always feeling like an outsider and being terribly self-conscious. At 95, she says she is finally having her happy childhood. She is learning how to play because she didn’t really know what play was when she was young. Her description of play is beautiful: exploring, experimenting, being curious, looking and seeing, being in the body, being alive, not being afraid, being free.

At one point in the film, we see Dot on a swing. This immediately reminded me of my mom in her mid-80s who still loves to swing. That touched something tender in me, and I felt tears coming to my eyes. I wanted my mom to meet Dot too, in the only way now possible, so I sent her the video.

Later Dot says, “I want to be a child of wonder and astonishment.”

Well, those words certainly found their way directly to me.

I have spent years thinking and writing about wonder—about paying attention to the ordinary magic around us, remaining curious, following unexpected paths, and allowing ourselves to play. More recently, I have been thinking even more intentionally about wonder spotting and what happens when we make ourselves available to notice what is right in front of us. Here was a woman nearing the end of a very long life saying that she still wanted to be a child of wonder and astonishment.

I believe wholeheartedly that wonder isn’t something we are supposed to outgrow. Seeking it, noticing it, and making room for it makes this journey more magical and worthwhile.

Dot had survived cancer years earlier, and after her surgery she felt that she needed to understand why she had been spared and given her life back. Over time, she came to believe that she had something to give: her light. What struck me was that she didn’t describe that light in terms of accomplishments or some grand purpose. She talked about harmlessness and harmony, singing, joy, rejoicing, and gratitude.

Of course that resonated with me. I believe we each carry something uniquely ours into this world. It doesn’t have to be enormous, famous, or measurable. Sometimes what we give is simply the particular way we move through the world, how we love, what we notice, what we create, and what becomes possible for someone else because we were here.

Dot also talks about the strange combination of sameness and uniqueness that connects us. We are all made of the same stuff—cells and molecules, the same basic material as one another and the world around us. Star stuff, essentially. Yet every one of us is put together differently. She describes it as “same same and different.” She is the same as the tree and different from the tree. She is part of the grass and dirt and even, she jokes, the compost pile, which at 95 she knows she is eventually headed toward.

I loved her humor, but I also loved the idea underneath it. We belong to one another and to this earth, while at the same time there will never be another one of us assembled in precisely the same way. It made me wonder what each of us will do with our own particular arrangement of star stuff during the time we are here.

After the film ended, I wasn’t quite ready to leave Dot. I wanted to know more about her, so naturally I started digging.

That was when I discovered that Dot had died. Reflections of Life had added a pinned comment sharing the news of her passing and describing how meaningful their time with her had been. There was something especially poignant about learning she was gone immediately after spending those minutes watching someone who seemed so completely alive.

As I continued down the rabbit hole, I discovered that the woman I’d just met had lived quite a life. Dot was an artist, writer, counselor, longtime Zen practitioner, environmental and peace activist, hiker, camper, and beloved community elder. At 67, this gentle woman I had just watched talking about gratitude and wonder had even chained herself by the neck to a logging truck while protesting the destruction of old-growth forest. That discovery made me smile. There was clearly a lot of fire inside Dot Fisher-Smith.

She continued making art, writing, hiking, and participating in her community as she grew older. She rode her bicycle around Ashland well into her 90s. The more I learned about her, the more weight her words in the film seemed to carry. She wasn’t offering an abstract philosophy about remaining engaged with life. She had spent decades practicing it.

All of this had started because I signed up for a workshop about aging, and before I even attended the workshop, I found myself thinking much more deeply about what aging means to me. The registration included a pre-workshop survey, which I initially opened and thought, Oh no, this is going to take a while. It did take a little while, but the questions turned out to be worth sitting with.

I was asked about my role models for aging well, the negative messages about aging that I would like to release, and what I imagined aging would look like when I was younger. I remembered being in college and helping to plan my dad’s 50th birthday, complete with “Old Buzzard” decorations. Fifty seemed old then. Now I am 57, and when someone dies at 80, I can find myself thinking, Wow, only 80. Aging certainly looks different from inside the years than it did when I was looking at them from far away.

The survey also asked me what adjectives I would use to describe aging. My answers came surprisingly easily: a gift, natural, a privilege, an adventure, wonder-filled, and awesome. Growing older means I’ve been given more time. Not everyone gets that opportunity, and I don’t know what the years ahead will bring. There is still more to notice, discover, experience, and be awed by.

None of those words means that I am naïve about what aging can bring. If we are fortunate enough to live a very long life, we will almost certainly say goodbye to people we love along the way. Loneliness can be real. Bodies change. Independence can change. Our physical worlds may sometimes become smaller. These things aren’t simply negative messages about aging that can be erased with positive thinking. They are some of the genuine challenges of being human.

Dot knew that too. She spoke openly about contemplating her own death and hoping that when it came she could leave gently, with awareness, gratitude, and joy. She didn’t claim to know what happens next or to have solved the mystery of being alive. Instead, she said she wanted to stop trying to figure everything out and “just be in awe.”

Near the end of the film, Dot is asked about the secret to longevity. Her answer is wonderfully simple: “Go slow.” Slow enough to know where to seek truth, when to speak from your heart, and ultimately to recognize that the only time available to enjoy this day is right now.

I keep thinking about how I found Dot in the first place. An email caught my attention. I clicked. I signed up for something because I was curious. I poked around somewhere I had never been before. I clicked again, and suddenly I was sitting with a woman in Ashland whom I would never meet, listening to her talk about wonder, play, gratitude, mortality, and what it means to be alive.

Sometimes curiosity doesn’t know where it is going. Sometimes we follow an unexpected path simply because something catches our attention, and if we remain open to where it leads, we find something beautiful that we weren’t looking for.

I wish I could have met Dot.

But perhaps this is one of the ways our light continues traveling after we’re gone. Dot shared hers with Justine and Michael. They captured a little of it on film. Someone at Grateful Living placed that film in a collection called Tuesday Treats. I happened to wander in and click on it. And two years after that film was made, Dot Fisher-Smith reached a 57-year-old woman she never knew and made her think more deeply about how she wants to live the rest of her own life.

I don’t want to have just visited this world either. I want to explore it and play in it. I want to follow rabbit holes and notice ordinary wonders. I want to remain curious about people and ideas and places I haven’t discovered yet. I want to be grateful for this strange and extraordinary privilege of inhabiting a human body for however long I get to have it.

And someday, if I am fortunate enough to become very old, I plan to keep seeking and finding things that fill me with wonder and astonishment.

I plan, like my mom and Dot, to still swing.

Thank you, Dot. 💚

Watch To Be In Awe
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to meet Dot Fisher-Smith for yourself below.

Filmed and edited by Justine and Michael of Reflections of Life. You can discover more of their beautiful films on the Reflections of Life YouTube channel.