Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

A tribute to our 8- and 80-year-old selves

The author, near front left, at age 8, the only girl in an all boys choir, pictured here singing in a random church somewhere in the southern United States.

Sometimes you have to go back before you can move forward, like a slingshot pulled taut, ready to release.

I left my lifelong career this year, and it has left me with more questions than answers: Whose opinion matters? Who do I look to as a role model? Whose judgment do I trust?

Right now, I am making choices I trust both my 8-year-old and my 80-year-old self would be proud of.

What about you? What does your 8-year-old self want for you? What about your 80-year-old self?

I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

I dreaded the months leading up to my 8th birthday.

My grandfather preached that 8 was the age of accountability, the age when we could no longer be shielded by our parents’ faith, the age when hell became a real and personal threat. Eternity was no longer a concept. It was a consequence. Hell was a real place, where there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

That year, I read the entire King James Bible cover to cover. I spent long hours kneeling—by my bed, in church, at altars both real and imagined—begging God to change me, so I wouldn’t go to hell.

The summer I was 8, I performed across the country in a musical with 72 boys and men, singing in churches on Sundays, and every evening in KOA campgrounds. I performed a solo version of Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep every night, kneeling in a white nightgown, my voice high and plaintive:

Now I lay me down to sleep/I pray the Lord my soul to keep/ If I should die before I wake/ I pray the Lord my soul to take/God bless mommy and daddy and Timmy too/Help us to live as you planned, and depend upon you/Help us care for each other, grant us love, faith and trust/And help us not be afraid to stand alone if we must/For you are there, watching all that we do/And some day, we must answer to you.

At 8, I didn’t have a self. At 8, what I had was fear.

And at 80? If I make it there, I know I will appreciate every risk my present self is taking, because they are all leading me to trusting my own voice.

I don’t know what my 8-year-old self would have wanted, had she been allowed to want, but I know she was sick of kneeling. If she could imagined such a thing, she would have wanted me to stop bending a knee.

So when I reach down into the part of the 8-year-old who still lives in me, she encourages me to stop surrendering to the ideological apparatus that formed me. She wants me to stop living in the crippling fear that she did.

And you? What does your 8-year-old self want for you? What about your 80-year-old self?

Are you listening?

In what areas of your life are you journeying from the known to the unknown?

What would your 8 and 80 year-old selves think of these?

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