Chapter 7/9

Aging

The morning I turned forty-five, before I even got out of bed, I decided that I was now “old enough.” All my life I had heard, “You’re not old enough . . .” to remember . . . , to do that, to wear that, to understand . . . , to enjoy. . .. On that day, February 15, 1979, I decreed that I was old enough for whatever.
But that notion begat another: I may be old enough, but I was not yet “old.” So, at forty-five I began to prepare for old age. I began studying gerontology. In succeeding years, I began carefully observing elderly people. I soon concluded that most people, if they live long enough, flunk old age. At least most that I have observed did not have a happy ending to their story.

People who had accumulated wealth and all that comes with it, or who had risen to prestigious positions of leadership, or who had the sophistication that accompanies world travel and education from elite universities–people such as these I have watched, and in large measure seen them end their years in the misery of emptiness. As a result, I began in earnest to study individuals who had earned good grades in aging. I knew my time would come, and I wanted to know the joy of a life fulfilled.

Now I am an old man in my seventies. What have I learned across the past thirty years? I’ve learned that the secret of successful aging lies in the bipolar dialectic of continuity and change, the every-changing, but necessary tension between thinking–and thus, living–like a conservative and like a progressive. Tradition and novelty.

Somewhere along the way I read and bought into the idea that the secret of successful aging was the ability to adapt. Those who can’t, or don’t, or won’t adapt are shunted off the road of life, into the ditch of bitterness. Yes, adaptability is essential. It is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a good old age. The ability to adapt is one of those poles that is invalid when taken by itself. It makes its contribution to life, to old age, only as it lives in tension with the other pole: the commitment to hold onto those things that we have staked our lives on, believe in, and have integrated into our character.

On the other hand, necessary as it is to hold onto the best of the past, conservativism is insufficient to lead us to Browning’s “best [that] is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.” To adopt a purely conservative stance toward life is to become stagnant, then sour, then morose; it is a guarantor of misery.

It takes both. Some of us will need to maintain more continuity with the past, and keep more traditions, while others will need to venture more into the new cultures that continually emerge. But all of us must conserve that which we most value and believe in. All of us must adapt to some of the unavoidable novelty that seems so foreign to the world in which we spent most of our lives.
Myself, I hold to the matchless personal and social value of traditional marriage with its associated lifetime vows. In a world that increasingly distances itself from the natural, favoring rather the man-made modifications and replacements of nature, I am a determined conservative of the natural, the wild, and that which is essentially untouched, left in its apparently chaotic biodiversity. The blue bib overalls and western-style hats that are part of my rural Oklahoma heritage and that I still wear much of the time help give continuity to who I am.

On the other hand, I am on good terms with Gmail, blogging, Twitter, cell phones, and solar panels. I relate easily and comfortably with the generation of body piercings, tattoos, iPods, and MTV. They speak a different language, dress differently, and represent a culture completely foreign to what feels natural to me. But I made the choice back when I was forty-five that I would gradually become a naturalized citizen of this new nation, the nation of the younger, because, as is commonly said, I know that we are more alike than we are different.

It has not been easy to live feeling the strong pull from both poles. I have often lost my balance, often allowed myself to be pulled down, often failed to live the tension. Often I think I could relax and feel more comfortable if I allowed myself to completely polarize, but that would be to choose to lose so much that is vital.