View from ahead

I have been reading Dr. Oliver Sacks' books for many years -- 20, or more. He is a thoughtful and wise man.  Recently an article by him was in the New York Times Magazine. He wrote about his father's attitude toward life at age 80.  Dr. Sacks isn't 80 yet, nor am I.  But we are both thinking ahead.  Sacks wrote:

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty.
At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.
I am looking forward to being 80.
- Oliver Sacks in The Joy of Old Age. (No Kidding.) – New York Times

A positive attitude toward getting older I wish everyone could feel. I hope I feel that way at 80; I wish I were able to write as well about it sa Sacks did.

Lessons Learned

Maybe I should say lessons contemplated.  I'm approaching a birthday, always an occasion for  meditation.  One of the recurring thoughts is that new lessons keep popping up in our lives and the ones that matter are usually surprises.  In well over seventy years, I see that I cannot control much about my fairly simple life and that the only preparation for the sudden shocks is patience and belief in the powers of my aging body that, I'm seeing clearly, are not the same powers that body has always enjoyed.

Those are the generalities.  Generalities are like melting ice cubes (here now, gone very shortly) without specifics.  Specifically, of course, I'm thinking of the current bout with ehrliciosis, a mean little bacteria I never heard of until early this week, that came to try to live in my blood having hitched a ride on a common tick.  I have always been a very healthy person and take my good health and stamina for granted.  Lesson: no one should take good health for granted, yet we can't avoid doing so.  I've done the right things in terms of diet, exercise, good sleep and hygiene habits.  That's been enough.  Ehrliciosis doesn't give a damn.  The bug just found a good supply of blood to invade.  The good news is that ehrliciosis has a proven enemy, doxycycline, an antibiotic that I'm told will kill it all off in a total of ten days -- i.e., sometime next week. Happily the hospitalists at our local hospital arrived at a cause for my unhappy symptoms quickly and send off blood samples for identification immediately.  Hurray!  War won!

Not so fast.  More lessons on the boards.  As bodies are supposed to do, mine reacted with high fever that sapped my physical strength like a wet rag being wrung limp.  I watched my body unable to simply get up off the floor despite what should be normal effort. I watched my generally lucid mind compulsively "write" the history of Alexander the Great, Roxanna and Beucephalus in those long night hours when I passed between sleep and wake.  Actually I know little about Alexander and haven't a clue why that history obsessed me so suddenly.  I watched the hospital staff unwittingly -- although it is what they do -- infantilize me for the sake of my own safety.  I had little strength so they did not allow me to get out of bed without someone at my side, they feared I'd fall in the six feet from bed to bathroom and even added a brilliant yellow plastic bracelet marked RISK.  I came to distrust my own sense of balance standing on my two familiar, dependable feet.

Being an analyzer of situations and watcher of my own reactions, I saw that many other people my age with little experience of hospitals could find this the first step of a downward spiral of dependence and loss of self-confidence.  The nurses were more than happy to set up visits by visiting nurses to continue my dependency.  Living alone is a danger signal in their minds.  I understand but I reject the premise.  I'm not ready for the med-alert button.  I'll go on taking my chances.

Another lesson, not the last, but enough for present considerations:  follow up doctor's appointments litter my calendar for the next month.  Ehrliciosis did some possibly lasting damage to internal systems like the liver (perhaps that wasn't the bug but the bombardment of a whole armamentarium of antibiotics and auxiliary drugs poured into me in a very short time).  There are consequences of this episode.  There are always consequences!

Song, by Adrienne Rich

National Poetry Month, for me, demands a diet rich in poems. This is simply called "Song" by Adrienne Rich.

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
Okay, then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived, and died in, lonely.

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn's first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep.

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood with a gift for burning.


I was going to post the poem with no further comment today but as I've been typing it I realize it is an answer to a discussion in a class last week about aging in which was put forth the finding of various researchers that aging people do better longer if they are involved in a social network. I do not dispute that except the matter arose, what of people who are loners by nature? I fit in this category, I have not lead what's considered a loner life but I have lived lone more than half my life and like it. I travel alone [but often with a group of strangers] I like to go to cultural events alone, I like to walk alone, I treasure my aloneness. I think Adrienne Rich has defined "loneliness" for me -- and perhaps that is true for most of us who write or have pursued other artistic lives.

What age?

"Gray is the new blond," says the wonderful blog Advanced Style which I have come across every now and then and which I'm going to add to my sidebar soon. [Doing these computer caretaking things needs mental working up to -- I think it's like learning to ride a horse, it takes nerve to actually begin when one gets ove a certain age.] The woman in the picture for that particular post has waist length gray hair. But, hey, I'm just as gray so there I am.

Lately I've realized anew, as I realize every now and then, that I no longer can judge age of anyone over, say 11 or 12. Styles change, and the usual messages about hairdos and clothing on people are highly confusing. I was speaking to a woman a few days ago who looks very young to me, perhaps early 40s, as we talked she revealed that she is 57. I was flummoxed. Perhaps one of the best lessons is to simply forget about age to a very large extent and just interact with everyone as individuals. Sounds so totally obvious. But very few people ever shed the habit of categorizing people by their apparent age, even if, like me, they are often wrong about their age guesses. For many gray hair is an indicator but that's iffy too. I was mostly gray at 45, so are many other people. And then there are those who don't go gray -- naturally or artificially.

Anyway, I recommend Advanced Style because the blogger takes fantastic picture of fantastic people on the streets of New York. Prejudiced as I am, I think there's no city with street life like New York -- I miss it.

Act You're Grandkid's Age -II

The article I was discussing goes on to say that current pop media tells the over-70s that they must be proactive to "stay young". As a comment on yesterday's blog said, there are practitioners of yoga in their 80s and 90 who are healthy and very active. I'm a strong believer in the benefits of yoga, a flexible body leads to a flexible mind and gives energy most older people don't have. But the article wasn't talking about that -- the few who do yoga late in life are an exception. Most aging people are urged to stay very busy, "volunteer!" and play golf and tennis, walk, have a busy social life. I agree that all those things are good and I feel that social life ought to extend beyond your family -- by the 70s family see you through blinders of familiarity and habit including both good and bad past experiences. So being involved with an organization in your community whose purpose you believe in whether church or culture or service of some sort is valuable. This is the line we all read in magazines from AARP's to the women's service mags to newspaper articles.

But as Ms. Zernike also points out, this emphasis on doing things leaves out the opportunity for contemplation that leads to preparation for the inevitable end. Those who are too busy, or simply unwilling to face their own mortality will be unprepared for decisions and emotions that will come unless they get that day dream so many have, of lying down one night, having a quiet heart attack and dying without waking up. That sounds very nice to a lot of people -- especially those who have a way of avoiding responsibility for their on lives, and their numbers are legion. That nice neat death is extremely rare.

Even the yoga practitioners should be thinking about an end. One of the ancient purposes of hatha yoga was to prepare the body for a transition from life to death, even to gain the control to choose the time of death. There are stories of yogis who were able to make such a choice. This is usually not a part of American practice of yoga.

I've observed people I've known who lived "normal" lives, that as the physical body deteriorated they began to think more about religion. My highly skeptical mother became much more religions after a major heart attack and surgery. Others I've known have also. And certainly it seems better to do so before dementia sets in -- which is not inevitable but which is mostly unpredictable.

I'm glad the Times chose to publish this particular article in the much read Week in Review section. In the magazine yesterday they also had an article about cryogenics -- the idea of having your body and/or brain frozen in the hope that in the future technology will allow resurrection. That is quite a different subject. We won't go there, not just now but probably never.

Catching up, Straightening up

Some straightening up today -- which seemed a fitting activity for a new year's day. I found a notebook in which I had kept some clippings I thought I'd use in this blog but they got buried. I'll get to them, I think, now that I know I have them and perhaps add to the pile. For now, a quote from poet Robert Bly.

We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing from the great roots.


I have recently read another poem by a person struggling to know how to write poetry. The poem painted a picture of an elderly couple in stereotypical old age distress, he slow to remember things, and struggling with physical ineptness, and she in serious pain, wondering if she had enough medicine, perhaps enough money for more. Many people certainly do have these problems and more. It would be dishonest and destructive to deny the deficits of the elderly. But that is not all people nor all the life of the people who do have the problems.

One of my clippings has a headline saying the elderly are, by and large, happier than younger people. They were not talking about wealthy/healthy older people, they were talking demographically, statistically. A great many older people have learned to appreciate simpler things, know the importance of noticing what is beautiful around them, are glad for what health and good things they have. They may have to medicate the pain, may have to worry about the money to pay for it, may forget this or that more or less often, and walk more slowly, can be clumsy. All that; as in Bly's poem, they are broken [by the storms of life that they have lived through] but like trees they have deep roots of experience. I don't want to be soppy or to minimize the negative but I am optimistic, I see older people who are active and interesting and very much involved in living.