My perspective began to change at 70 on a bus ride in Malta.

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We begin life needing help for everything.

We’re then taught for two decades to make our own decisions.

A lesson we repeat to our children.

Eventually, fully independent, new choices arise when we are free from kids and jobs.

Finally, we are back where we started, needing help for everything.

When did the worm start turning for you?

Have you changed your perspective about being dependent?

To do what I want, I increasingly need help. This paradox may have been hidden from me throughout adulthood. It’s now come into full view.

With some help from Priority Seating.

*

The second time it happened was on a packed bus in Malta in 2018, about an hour before I took this photo of Rebecca. The bus was so crowded I couldn’t get my hand in my pocket to take out my phone to chronicle the congestion.Malta is a tiny nation in the Mediterranean that accommodates 518,538 people on three islands, about 1/10 the area of Rhode Island. Despite having one car for every person, its public buses are always full.

My employer, Luther College, has a semester program in this former British colony. Rebecca and I supervised the study of 11 students during the spring of 2018. With our students traveling alone this weekend, we hopped a bus in Valletta, Malta’s capital city, for the 78-minute trip across the country to beautiful Dingli Cliffs.

When we eventually found the Cliffs, we could savor this spectacular view.

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A few weeks earlier, on a crowded London Underground Tube carriage, we first heard these words directed at us by a young woman: “Would you like our seats?” With a nod, her partner seconded the invitation.

“Thanks, but we’re OK,” we replied, as Rebecca had a strap handle and I a pole. We’re both early baby boomers, so we knew chronology fit us into the older, priority seating category. But our younger-than-we-look genes had given us cover. It was shocking to discover that even our disguised selves looked old enough for priority seating.

I didn’t think much about this until we boarded that Malta bus.

Rebecca found a seat, and I, feeling virtuous and spritely, repeatedly declined seat offerings until they stopped coming. The priority seats were monopolized by a couple who appeared a little younger than me, obviously destined for Dingli Cliffs. About an hour into the bone-rattling journey, virtue and sprite long gone, I thought about pulling out my passport to plead my case to the woman who looked saintly.

As I look back, the bone-rattling Dingli Cliffs trip opened the door of dependence, a crack. Toward the end of our four months in Malta, I admitted to Rebecca and myself that I had come to dread our weekend bus trips visiting Malta sites unless I knew I would have a seat. And I didn’t yet feel comfortable grabbing a priority seat or accepting its offer.

For example, we decided not to visit the village of Melleha, the site of the 1980 film Popeye starring Robin Williams, because of the high likelihood of standing for more than an hour.

But what if we had missed Dingli Cliffs?

Or, in London, because of the crowded Underground, this painting by Amedeo Modigliani at The Courtauld Gallery?

So I began to rethink my refusal to accept a seat, to get from A to Beat.

That’s not me, but he looks comfortable and at peace.

How did he get to that place? How could I do the same?

*

In retrospect, I had started this journey on the Dingli Cliffs bus by recognizing my mortality. In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande puts it this way.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life — to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

As my body diminishes, I will need help to keep doing what I want to maintain my life’s integrity.

To experience a birds-eye view of the Mediterranean or gaze at an exquisite painting.

Occasionally, this may require you to give up your seat to me.

I will accept it with gratitude and more than a dab of sorrow.