Facing old age

 Sam Smith – The current battle for the White House has taken a turn that impacts my personal life, thanks to the debate over the proper age of a president. I have managed with little difficulty to ignore my age as I go through my daily doings but I now find, being five years older than Biden and nine years older than Trump, that I may just not be able to be president, but perhaps a lot of other things as well.

It is a matter I have previously avoided without much effort even though I have lived longer than every male in my family going back four generations. It has seemed something to observe without talking about it. For example, I’ve recorded the names of those relatives, friends and others I have known who have died in the past two decades and that number is now over 200.

The biggest generational problem of being in your 80s is that the rest of society starts to drop you off their invitation and inquiry lists. I don’t find myself discriminated against so much as just being discounted along with other oldies.  Interestingly, as I have previously noted, this not just about individuals. The whole period in which we oldies have lived is part of what I called proto-history, namely history not yet considered worth spending a lot of time on. Thus we read more about slavery than, say, the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

I expect to survive my current state, thanks in part to realizing that there is nothing much I can do about it except to continue to confront the real world like a kid playing soccer, accepting both victories and defeats. And to read again from time to time the book my wife recently gave me: William Martin’s The Sage’s Tap Te Ching,  a modern revision of an ancient Chinese work.

As Alan Watts once wrote::  “Taoist thought is for older people because they have tried everything else and found it doesn’t work. If there is to be a transformation, it will be the sages among us who will show the way. The elders, the wisewomen, the shamans, the grandmothers, and the grandfathers will provide the guidance, for they have undergone the necessary initiations. They have faced the shearing-away of illusions, and, in the face of loss and pain, have emerged into the spaciousness of simplicity, freedom, and joy.”

We can expect  nothing like this from either Trump or Biden but perhaps a few words from Martin’s work, will help:

Don’t accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage, a river at its deepest and most nourishing.
Sit by a riverbank sometime and watch attentively as the river tells you of your life.

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 The truth of growing older cannot be described, only experienced.
We are unaware of becoming sages, we just know that we are at peace.
We are unaware of being wise, we just know that we are content.