“Another old man and the sea,” the stranger said to me as I tossed some trash in the bin on the beach. Our family was enjoying a week’s vacation in Florida.
I must admit, the man wasn’t far from the truth. The beach has no mercy for people’s age. It practically announces it. Every wrinkle feels like the Grand Canyon, and every extra pound shouts, “I love brownies.”
I wear my bucket hat to avoid sun exposure to my face and neck, and the UPF sun hoodie to protect the rest of my upper body. As I lather sunscreen on my legs, I hear my dermatologist say, “Beware of the sun.” Isn’t it ironic that we go to the beach to enjoy the sun, then take extreme precautions to avoid it?
My non-prescription sunglasses didn’t help my “old guy on the beach” image. I walked into a family of beach dwellers relaxing under a tent and asked John, my son-in-law, how he was doing. That’s when I recognized it wasn’t John and that I was about to make myself comfortable in another family’s beach chair.
My poor vision prompted the guy on the beach to declare me a member of the “old man fraternity,” with his reference to Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel, “The Old Man and the Sea.” I had asked him what the “P” on his ballcap stood for. It was actually an “R,” but I didn’t hang around long enough to ask for clarification.
I turned and walked back to my family.
As I did, the man’s words, “Another old man and the sea,” followed me.
“The Old Man and the Sea” is actually one of my Hemingway favorites. Hemingway’s old fisherman, Santiago, went eighty-four days without catching a fish, and everybody in the village had written him off as finished, washed up. Then, on day eighty-five, Santiago hooks the marlin of a lifetime—a fish so big it drags his skiff out to sea for three relentless days. His hands are cut raw by the line. His back aches. He talks to himself, the fish, to the stars, to keep going. And in the end, the sharks strip the marlin down to a skeleton before he even makes it home. By every measure the world uses, he loses.
Except he doesn’t. Santiago’s real triumph was never about the fish. It was that he went out further than he’d ever gone, endured more than he thought he could, and refused to let his age talk him out of trying. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated,” Hemingway wrote. That’s not a line about young men. That’s a line for those of us who’ve started measuring our accomplishments not by what we caught, but by whether we made it back to the dock at all.
There’s an old saying I love: “The old man may not walk as fast, but he knows the road.” I think about that every time I watch my grandson, Eli, sprint across the yard like his legs are on fire. It was only a few years ago that I tore my meniscus trying to catch him. I didn’t know it, but I was close to crossing that invisible threshold into “aging.”
But the truth is, everyone is aging. We’re just at different stages of the process. It’s our attitude, something we can control, that determines how we age. Eli’s got speed. I’ve got the map. He doesn’t yet know which turns lead him nowhere, which hills aren’t worth the climb, and which storms are best sat out on the porch. That knowledge doesn’t come from youth. It comes from having walked the road already — sometimes more than once, sometimes the hard way. It comes from wisdom, not from age alone, but from that slow, deliberate walk with God, the walk with ears to listen, and humility to ask the Lord to “keep steady my steps” (Psalm 119:131).
All that is undergirded by a faith that trusts God to lead us not only safely to heaven’s shore, but best of all: the comfort in knowing He will be there to embrace us when we arrive, even if, like Santiago’s marlin, all our works like “filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6) have been lost.