Feeling Invisible

The Arc of Being Seen, Noticed and Valued

Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

First of all, welcome, welcome to all the new Substack Subscribers! This is where my soul is meeting the world. It is where my voice—anchored to my heart and the world are intersecting. I’m doing that here through prose and poems. I’m glad you are here and everyone who subscribes, is most welcomed here!

This week, I wrote a poem about feeling invisible. After all, I led a public life—I spoke, published books, wrote articles, led retreats and so on. As a leader, I’m not sure I could say I was accustomed to feeling— invisible. But now, in this new season of my life—in this journey of aging, feeling invisible is one of the feelings that seems to be surfacing more and more. It’s an awkward feeling. I’m not sure just how I feel about it. When I monitor my internal world and bump up against a cloud that makes me feel dimished; ignored and side-lined, sometimes, I get angry, upset and mad. But in reflecting upon it more in the quiet, I hear a Voice that says, “Steve, this is the way it is. Your invitation is to accept it or fight it.” Right now, I am doing both.

Parker Palmer, my life mentor says, “We have no choice about death. But we do have choices to make about how we hold the inevitable—choices made difficult be a culture that celebrates youth, disparages old age, and discourages us from facing into our mortality. The laws of nature that dictates the sunset dictate our demise. But how we travel the arc between our own sunrise and sundown is ours to choose.”

How we travel the arc is mine to choose! So, here is my poem and a few more words about me traveling my own arc of aging.

Lately, I have felt more invisible than seen; more diminished than valued; more overlooked than heard. Who knows, Substack may just well be my final pulpit—we shall see.

I sent this to a friend earlier in the week to see what he thought. He wrote back: “It’s beautiful. It is terrible…” So, I wonder now what you my Circle of Substack folks might say.

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So, Substack Friends, this is where I invite you to take a further step in and up with me. To read on, you’ll need to become a “paid subscriber.”