Reflection: Aging

Rita Hays
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Palo Alto, CA

It sneaks up on you. You live a busy life doing what you set out to do. Maybe having a career, maybe raising a family, maybe saving the world, maybe all of those things. With both relief and misgiving, you retire or cut back from your work. Your children leave home — if you are lucky. You discover that you can only save a little piece of the world, if that. All of a sudden, the people around you are younger than you — when you used to be the young one among respected elders.

So how do we deal with this new freedom, freedom that we may not have sought? Now we have a chance to look inward, to decide what we really want to do. Many of us do volunteer work, perhaps using our skills to make a real difference to other individuals. Or we may look to the larger picture, putting our expertise, and what energy we have, to make a difference on a larger scale. There is no retirement from ACTERRA or from the League of Women Voters or from UUCPA’s many opportunities.

But it also is a time to think of ourselves and perhaps to fill in some of the pleasures we set aside when we were so busy. I myself set aside my interest in astronomy when I entered medical school. I recently became by far the oldest student in Foothill College’s introductory course in astronomy. I can assure you that astronomy has changed remarkably since my college days. I love to travel and used to travel a lot in my work. But now I choose where I go. Perhaps I expand my grandchildren’s horizons a bit by the records of my travels, but I really travel for my own pleasure. I have convinced myself that that is a good enough reason.

Those who have hobbies are lucky. I have a friend who filled his garage with the model railroad he had always wanted. Those who have gardens and love to see things grow now have time to branch out to more venturesome plantings.

As for being a sage, this is a bit tricky. Our society is not one in which the opinion of the elder is automatically taken as gospel. In fact, it may be discounted as outdated. But when an opinion is founded on facts, on our experience — of which we have much — it will be respected.

But even if we elders are not very useful in our current contribution to society, we can be role models for happy aging. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, distinguished between usefulness and dignity as one ages. In his book Man’s search for meaning he wrote “—today’s society adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness.” He goes on to point out that lack of usefulness was the justification for many of the Nazi atrocities against those not in the mainstream of culture.

Perhaps Kurt, young at 65, can tell us better how to be a sage.

I’d like to finish by reading a poem written by my friend Jane Robinson shortly before her 90^th birthday. Jane has surmounted many personal problems and remains a cheerful and productive person, and a friend to many.

THE AGING GAME
Jane J. Robinson

Looking backwards, I can see
twenty-one was the age for me.
I could cast my vote, I could buy a drink,
I could say whatever I happened to think.
(I sounded a lot like a parlor pink.)
Problems were simply for solving;
worth any candles my flame.
Around ME the world was revolving
and all my tigers were tame.
I thought to myself, "What a game!"
But forty-one brings a pall of gloom.
Sure, I can vote. God help me, for whom?
I can think and drink, but I fear to utter
words that could cost me my bread and butter.
(Even my brain is beginning to stutter.)
Problems resist resolving,
Candles melt in a flame.
The world I knew is dissolving.
I’ve learned that tigers can maim.
At forty-one it's not the same damn game!
Now in my eighties I’ve entered, I'm told,
a “golden age”. In short, I’m old.
But fears for my future no longer daunt me;
Guilt bearing ghosts are too tired to haunt me.
and friends and family still seem to want me.
So?
Insoluble problems? Outlast them.
No candles? Wait for the dawn.
Tigers? Walk warily past them.
Don't stir them up; do move on
in this game, never lost, never won.

Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto