He left home at fifty and did his life’s work on the road

In 1864 Robert Browning published a poem in the imagined voice of a historical figure who had been dead for nearly seven hundred years. Rabbi Ben Ezra was inspired by Abraham ibn Ezra, a Jewish scholar and poet born in Spain in the eleventh century.

Somewhere around the age of fifty, he left home. He spent the rest of a long life travelling, and most of the work he is remembered for, he wrote after that.

So when Browning gave him a voice, he gave it to a man who started over late. A man who did his finest work in the years everyone else calls the end.

The old man in the poem is speaking to someone. We are never told who, only that he wants them beside him for whatever comes next.

He does not open with regret, or with advice. He opens with an invitation.

Look at the word “for.”

The last of life, for which the first was made. He did not say the later years come after the early ones, the way leftovers come after dinner.

He said the early years were built for them. Everything before was scaffolding.

I need you to read that line again, slowly, because it is the exact opposite of what you have been told. It is the opposite of what all of us have been told.

We are told the first half is the life and the second half is the tidying up. That the want you are carrying belonged to a younger woman, and you are only minding it for her until it goes.

And then a man wrote, a hundred and sixty years ago, that youth shows but half.

Half. Not the best half, not the bright half, just half, like a letter somebody stopped reading in the middle.

Now look at how he begins. He does not say remember, and he does not say if only.

Grow old along with me. It is an invitation, in the present tense, from an old man, and it assumes somebody will say yes.

He is not apologising for asking. Do not skim past that.

And do not skim the last line either. See all, nor be afraid.

He is not promising you the waiting will be short. He is telling you to keep your eyes open while it lasts.

You have seen “the best is yet to be” on a greeting card, a wedding cake, a coffee mug. You have never seen what it was standing next to.

It was standing next to a man who left everything he knew at fifty and wrote his life’s work afterwards. It was never a slogan. It was a report.

This poem is free, and most of us have only ever met its first two lines, on a mug.

The want you are carrying is not late. By this poem’s arithmetic, it is right on time.

Today. Copy all six lines by hand, including the four nobody prints on mugs. Then write one line of your own about something you want that you have been treating as expired. Put it in the present tense, and do not cross it out.

Twenty-two years ago I copied the last line of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” onto a page that has since gone soft at the corners. “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

I thought then it was a line about effort. A line for people who grit their teeth.

I read it now and see where he put “find.” Third, after the striving and the seeking, not instead of them.

The old sailor fully expects to find. He simply refuses to skip the parts that come before.