The Watchman’s Milestone: Reflections on Becoming Seventy-One
"There is no bond among people that is tighter, nor love that is deeper, than the milk-tie of the foster-mother and the shield-arm of the foster-father." — Paraphrased from the Brehon Laws
There is a strange, quiet gravity that comes with realizing you have outlived the morning of your own story.
As someone who has spent a lifetime watching, listening, and navigating the world from the quiet spaces, I am feeling the heavy, beautiful passage of time more keenly than ever. This Friday, I will step across the threshold into my seventy-first year. If you had told the boy I used to be, the middle child who learned to navigate the world by watching the spaces between his siblings, that he would one day reach this vantage point, he would not have believed you. He knew, even then, that life was a fragile thread.
Of the six children my parents brought into this world, I am now the oldest. I am the one who has lived the longest. I am amazed by the shape of my journey. I know I have not walked this path alone. I survived because I was allowed to depend on others.
Time has a way of clarifying the landscape of memory. I carry with me always the ghost of my brother, who stepped out of the story at just eighteen, and my sister, who left us at fifty-nine. To be the surviving watchman of your original tribe is a profound mystery. You look back at the empty chairs, not just with sorrow, but with a deep, breathless wonder that life carried you safely through the mist. Why am I the one still holding the ledger?
The answer, I’ve come to realize, is not that I was the strongest or the most resilient. The answer is that I was the most fiercely sheltered.
We live in a world that worships the myth of the self-made person, a culture that treats independence as the ultimate virtue.
But seventy-one years have taught me the opposite:
the truest grace of human existence is our capacity to depend on one another.
My life has been a series of concentric circles of shelter. In the beginning, there was the broad, unquestioned benevolence of my parents. Later, the landscape shifted, and I found myself anchored to the earth by the bright, vital lives of my children, whose presence demanded that I stand firm against the wind. That anchor continues through the gift of seven grandchildren.
But the deepest, most luminous grace of this long road has been the discovery of the Anam Chara—the soul-friend.
In Irish tradition, there is the idea of a geis, a binding obligation that shapes how a person must live. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to believe that our deepest obligations are not magical prohibitions but relationships of care, the invisible promises we make to one another.
I deeply believe in the concept of Anam Chara. It is not a transactional relationship, nor is it a vertical hierarchy in which one must always be the protector and the other the protected. Instead, it is a safe, sacred space of compassionate presence.
Chief among these for me is my wife, alongside a few rare, chosen friends who have walked through the thickets with me. It is one of the few places in life where the armor can come off without anything essential being at risk. There is no need for performance, no requirement to be the unyielding shield. Instead, an Anam Chara relationship offers a beautiful way of finding emotional refuge, not as dependent children but as spiritual equals.
To look out at seventy-one years is to see a tapestry woven from the goodwill, patience, and love of others. I am here because I was allowed to lean. I am here because, when my own footing slipped, there were hands to hold me steady.
So, on Friday, when the calendar turns, I will not be celebrating my own endurance. I will be celebrating the hearths that kept me warm, the siblings who ran ahead but are never forgotten, the children and grandchildren who gave the journey its music, and the soul-friends who make the twilight of the story the most beautiful chapter of all.
Thank you for being part of this ledger, and for walking a piece of the road with me.
The greatest gift of a long life is discovering that we were never meant to carry it alone.