Stephanie Salter

By Stephanie Salter
CNHI News Service

From the moment many years ago when I read about the efficacy of voodoo, I understood that perception can become reality.

What we think is true, what we believe might happen – especially bad stuff – can produce the very results we dread.

It is inconsequential that, medically, people cannot be wounded by needles or knives being stuck into cotton dolls. Believing is seeing. All it takes is for one person to buy into the power of another who is working overtime on the first person’s demise.

There are many terms for this phenomenon, including “mind over matter” and “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

When directed toward a positive outcome (a less frequent human exercise, unfortunately), it looks like countless little viewers keeping Tinkerbell alive in “Peter Pan,” by truly believing they can clap her back to glowing health.

— Time out here to acknowledge that while many people think the act of prayer is voodoo, prayer is not what I’m discussing today (another topic, for another time).

Always a ponderous sort at the turn of a new year, let alone of a new decade, I have been cogitating on perception vs. reality in a particularly pronounced way of late. Besides, a couple of things happened in rapid succession that tempted my mind toward that fast, dark chute of voodoo think.

Only weeks past a really great, peak-experience, big birthday (60), I came across a chart of predictors for baby boomers like me. One phrase leapt out and attached itself to my consciousness like a huge, hairy beast: “Men can now expect to live to about age 75, women to 80.”

Twenty years?

I kept blinking at the line of type in the newspaper in my hands, waiting for it to change to something else. Say, 100.

Twenty years?

The last 20 years have flown like Peter, Wendy, John, Michael and Tink to Neverland.

No, they have flown like the Starship Enterprise at warp 9.6.

Only two or three years ago I was preparing for a black-tie Third Millennium New Year’s Eve party. But a stack of old calendars insists 1999 was a full decade ago.

Suddenly, I am living in dog years; one actually equals seven.

Shortly on the heels of the jarring actuarial encounter, I spent two days sifting through the names of hundreds of famous and semi-famous people who died this past year. Their ages were like disabling lasers shooting back at me from my computer screen.

Many of them did not make it to 80 — or 75. For several who did expire in their 80s, the source of death was listed only as “natural causes.”

In November, way back when “the rest of my life” seemed like a long, long time, I often remarked in the abstract about the way the years appear to speed up as one gets nearer to The End. One of my favorite metaphors was the sand in an hour glass (or three-minute egg timer): It falls at the same rate of speed at the beginning and the end of the timing cycle, but it looks as though it falls faster when the level of sand gets low.

“That’s how life is,” I would say, as if I actually knew what I was talking about. “It’s all in our perception.”

After I began to obsess about my final 20 years on Earth, I e-mailed a college buddy who turned 60 a few months before I did.

“Yeah. It sucks, doesn’t it?” he messaged back.

But, but … I replied through cyberspace, “I am no different, molecularly, than I was in the weeks leading up to celebrating my 60th, which I truly did. Then I read that actuarial table and my ATTITUDE changed.”

Later that very morning, as I read the daily offering in “A Year With Thomas Merton,” a passage from his Dec. 27, 1960, journal entry nailed me to my favorite reading chair:

“I was wondering at the beginning of morning meditation if it would be given me to see another twelve years — to come to New Year’s, say, 1973. To live to be fifty-seven or nearly fifty-eight. Can such an age be possible?”

Then, as he so often did in his journals, Merton addressed his own questions and transcended them:

“What foolish perspectives we get onto, by believing in our calendars. As if numbers were the great reality, the sure thing, the gods of life and death. The numbers, good old numbers, faceless, voiceless, will surely be there with nothing to say.”

As Merton’s legion of fans knows, the Trappist monk was not given another 12 years. He got just under eight, dying — not from the intestinal maladies that dogged him and put him in the hospital numerous times — but from a bizarre, accidental electrocution in Thailand, Dec. 10, 1968.

What actuarial table could have predicted that?

Merton did in his last eight years what wise people have always done. As the antidote for mortality, he treated his unknown number of remaining years as precious. He didn’t waste them or spend them grousing, bitching or trafficking in the currency of many old (and young) people, being bitter.

He tried to live each day to the fullest — whatever that looked like for him, a hermit monk devoted to God, not for someone else.

For all I know, I could be given another 20 years or more. Then again, my own version of a defective fan could be just around the corner to stop my good old, faceless, voiceless numbers well short of any baby boom actuarial table.

Some people believe that die already is cast, that our deathday and birthday are written at the same moment. I am not one of those people.

I believe in chance, choices and the occasional miracle. The choice part — aka “free will” — is the only one in our direct control. We can see a cotton doll with needles stuck in its chest and head, or we can see the embodiment of imminent doom. We can focus on the still unannounced end or the possible riches on the path leading to it.

That has been the choice at the beginning of every new year. It was the choice last month, the choice yesterday, the choice this morning and the choice we’ll be given at the beginning of each day until our days are done.

Carpe diem, baby.

Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in Terre Haute, Ind. She can be reached at stephanie.salter@tribstar.com. CNHI News Service distributes her column.