Nader Shabahangi is a cofounder of AgeSong and noted author and guest lecturer. Join him here as he shares his thoughts on aging, the need for community, and other insights.
Looking at life from its end to its beginning: this is the opportunity that arises when we work with elders. From the vantage point of the elder, from the point of having almost completed this incarnation, life looks very differently. All this drive for material possession, for achievement, for status, degrees, recognition, all this drive is now seen for what it is: shallow and vain. In the face of the end of life different values emerge and you can see those values in the faces of many of our elders. Those faces show more often than not a kindness and gentleness, a longing for the moment of contact. Instead of a drive to achieve there is a drive to be here, present, an equanimity to be with what is. The mind, busy so much of our lives, has become still, quiet, at peace with all that is in and around us.
When we reach elderhood we are less the doer and more in the space of being done to. The prayer of St. Francis comes to mind: “Oh, Lord, let me be an instrument of your peace.” As elders we become instruments of the forces within and without, flow with what wants to happen, not what we want to have happen. Control is surrendered from the ‘I’ to the ‘it’ – it does and does to us what it pleases.
The issue of control is central to our Western culture. We pride ourselves on being in control. Being in control is seen as a sign of achievement and is often correlated in research studies to the degree to which we feel happy. Yet, whenever we allow ourselves to go a bit more deeply into this thought of who or what kind of control we really do possess, most of us will admit: we might have the illusion of control but in control we are not. The larger and more important issues of our lives, whom and what we encounter, into what family we are born, what we experience growing up, whether we will be healthy or not, have accidents or not, when we will die – all those truly central aspects of life are beyond our control.
So, who or what is in charge? Who or what controls our lives? This question continues to be the central question we humans have been trying to grapple with for as long as we can remember being around as inquisitive people. Elders remind us that this is, indeed, a central question worthy of asking ourselves. For if we do not ask this question we might wake up at the end of our lives and wonder what life we have lived – and if we have lived the life which really gave us the deep experience of being alive, having lived a life worth living.
What is this journey we call our life? Born into circumstances with our own personality make-up, we grow and mature, enter the world of adulthood, look around, get a sense of what is expected, and either follow this expectation or try to move against it somehow. The years of middle adulthood give way to our older years and we might begin preparations for our letting go, becoming lighter as we move towards our final years.
As we live our life, we have choices to shape and color it in certain ways. Even though the content of our life might differ vastly between us people – we might have status and prestige, are rich or poor or somewhere in the middle – the attitude with which we approach our life remains a choice for us to make. I can be rich and powerful but feel miserable and lonely inside. Or I might be poor and alone but feel grateful and content for being able to live at all. I can take joy in the smallest elements life offers, the flower, the sun, sky, the smile on my own or someone else’s face – or I can be discontent because I compare myself to others, feel that I should have more, be different than I am. This choice of attitude is up to us alone.
Many of us agree that contentment, peace of mind, feeling grateful for what life offers in all its many colors and shapes, is a most desirable state to obtain. Yet, if we look around in our society, contentment with what is seems for many of us difficult to achieve.
Why? If you and I can understand that we create our own subjective reality, that we, ultimately, are responsible for our inner joy or misery unrelated to externalities, what stops us from creating a life of contentment and gratitude for what is?
This complex question is not a question with has one answer only. But given that it is a matter of how we think about life and how we judge or evaluate what we encounter in terms of good or bad, desirable or undesirable, one answer must lie with the way we use our mind. For it is our mind that thinks the thoughts that either make us feel at peace and content or make us feel anxious and fearful. So the question becomes: if our mind and what it thinks controls how we look at life, who or what controls our mind?
The question of the control of our mind has been the subject of much study in both the Eastern and Western traditions of thought. Both traditions have recognized that the mind, if left unattended, has a tendency to get us humans into trouble. The mind likes stimulation, likes to think about all kinds of ideas, likes to entertain a myriad of fantasies and possibilities, and is often directed by external stimuli and sense impressions. While some of these patterns are fruitful in terms of discovery and innovation, the incessant, non-stop thinking nature of the mind can just as much stand in the way of our desire for inner peace and contentment.
How do we take back control of our mind? Firstly, we must recognize how much our mind likes to be directed by sense objects it encounters outside of us. The mind has developed habits and patterns that it uses to discern what it likes and dislikes. This differentiation between likes and dislikes constitute the source of our suffering. Once we recognize how the mind is mostly not in our control, we can choose to embark on the often arduous journey to take control back.
Throughout the millennia of human thought, many wise thinker have pondered ways we might use to control our mind, to be in charge again of what and how it thinks. Most importantly, a regular practice of meditation aimed at stilling the mind has been proposed as an important tool to send a signal to the mind that we want to take control back. Through regular practice we continually enforce this desire and begin to let the mind know that we are serious about giving it new instructions about how to see and understand the world within which we live. Besides meditation, wise thinkers have proposed regular prayer and ritual, continued meetings and readings with fellow seekers, and the connection with and instructions from a wise teacher.
To age means to live. To live means to age. Today’s fascination with anti-aging measures overlooks this simple truism. Not to age is to arrest our growth and development, is to die, metaphorically and literally. The anti-aging movement looks at our physical bodies alone. It mistakes the package as the content of our lives. This is akin to buying a carton of milk and having more concern about the looks and color of the carton than its content. Imagine going to the store and purchasing a box of milk without paying attention to the milk’s expiration date? This is what we are doing when we talk about anti-aging, when we make the body’s appearance more important than our internal growth and maturation.
Over a hundred years ago the brilliant American psychologist William James stated poignantly that the single most important discovery of our age is that a change in our attitude can change our life. This is good news for us human beings as we have a choice in the way we want to look at life, i.e., in a way that gives us a sense of gratitude for all of who we are and all of what is; or are we choosing to look at life as an ongoing series of sufferings and turmoil to which we are, against our will, being subjected. This, indeed, is our choice.
Similarly, it is our choice to look at life from the viewpoint of ongoing decline as we age or from the perspective of ongoing growth and maturation. The former point of view imparts on us the specter of doom, of continued deterioration and, frankly, a life with increased suffering as we approach our later years. The latter point of view regards life as an ongoing process of learning and deepening, of continued maturation and broadening of vision. This is our choice. Which direction do you choose?
In a meeting with elders a few days ago I asked the question: what is good about being older. The first response from a group of over twenty elders was: discounts! Of course, in some ways this was meant as a joke. However, as Freud keenly observed over a hundred years ago, jokes are related to truths that reside deep within our unconscious. In other words, the joke contains an observation of life from which we can learn.
What is it about discounts that gives an elder, and probably most of us younger as well, a feeling of being special? Well, this is not too difficult to ponder. Discounts give us the feeling of being unique, give us a sense of reward for being part of a select group of people. In the case of elders, we might even feel that we have achieved something, reached a place in life where others, our society, feels that we are deserving of a treat.
To me there is a deep wisdom in the act of giving a discount, a special treat to an elder. Yes, it constitutes an acknowledgment of having lived a long life. But I believe there is something more fundamental behind the act of giving a discount. For through a discount, literally, our society is saying: we are giving back to our elders.
The question arises: giving back for what? What have elders done for society that makes us feel we need to give back to them?
This question can be answered from many different points of view. We can say they have been taxpayers most of their working lives and have contributed to the building and upkeep of our country. Or we can emphasize that many have had children and contributed to the growth and future of our country. Or we can point out that they have endured the difficulties and struggles of life and have not given up throughout it all. We also might emphasize that they are now grandparents and are helping the newer generations get situated and on track with their lives. Another perspective will see elders as being mentors, guides and civic elders who help steer our communities and cities with decisions based on their accumulated life-experiences and wisdom.
These are but a few of the different lenses through which we can see and value the life of our elders. We can also become even more philosophical and think, for a moment, about how many people have been touched by elders throughout their lives, how many people were influenced and directed by them, how much they have taught and given us in what often seem to be little but so very meaningful ways. My grandpa would have me sit on his lap many times and that feeling of being held and cared for sits deep within my being. Grandma’s loving smile is present with me especially when I need to face the more challenging moments life brings forth. All these encounters with a wise and loving elder make us who we are. They are and always will be priceless. They deserve a discount – and much, much more.
In his magnus opum Being and Time, Heidegger cites an old Latin fable entitled Cura, care. Using this fable he argues that the very essence of human beings is grounded in and formed by care. Given the complexity of human beings it follows that care as well constitutes a complex phenomenon. This viewpoint, however, is hardly commonly held. It is the reason why I am starting my writing here with such a fundamental opening and reminder.
The everyday assumption in our American society is that care is something we should know and do ‘naturally’, is something with which we are born. Following our above presupposition, this is, indeed, a valid belief.
As is true with anything that is very close to us, however, what is close is often the most difficult to see and understand. Case in point is the understanding of our very own self – though we could not be any closer to our own selves, we all too often know very little of who we are. And just as the process of understanding ourselves entails a lifetime-process of study and learning, of practice and experience, so an understanding of the nature and practice of care requires of us the same diligent effort and struggle.
Introduced as such, care is as complex as human beings themselves are complex. Especially, in the last century, we have come to appreciate complexity whether in the form of a systems understanding of the nature of our world, the recognition of the importance of process, or through noticing the multi-causality of events. Such recognition, however, has remained mostly theoretical. In the many expressions of health care, be that on the individual practitioner or the institutional level, the praxis of health care is dominated by a bio-medical model that reduces most symptoms to physico-chemical etiology and treatment. As such the multi-causal nature of symptoms is not further interrogated and the praxis of care remains oversimplified.
It would be easy to be pulled into an excursion on the reasons for such a state of affairs, a state that maintains a simplistic understanding of care notwithstanding the onslaught of theoretical and practical experience to the contrary. As an operator of elder communities it is my intent to introduce the insight of the complexity of care into the everyday practice of elder communities in the United States which has far-reaching ramifications for psychotherapeutic praxis with elders as well. Such an introduction, so is hoped, will serve also as a way to bring the understanding of the ‘complexity of care’ to other health care efforts.
To be human, fully, requires effort in living. We are roughly shaped clay and it is left to us to complete and polish who we are. Born into a time, circumstances and culture, these outside forces can bear heavy on our formation. Parents, schools, friends, environment and major events as we grow up, influence how it is we experience this world and ourselves. While outside forces are strong in the way they impact our formation, they are, nevertheless, small when compared to the thousands, even millions of years of our history and becoming. These years are part of us and constitute the bedrock of our existence now. This bedrock has been uncovered and illuminated by many a philosopher, thinker, and mystic from the many traditions and parts of our world. These exceptional humans not only have attempted to uncover the bedrock of our existence but have also provided us with ways to access and connect with this foundation. They have given us means such as meditation, prayer, selfless service and other ways of learning to love. Through such means, everyone of us common mortals has the ability to enter the realm of timeless truths, truths that provide us with a compass for our lives. This compass can direct us towards a life grounded in the deep wisdom of our ancestors as we need to face the challenges of our present lives. Grounded as such, the challenges we face in life are no longer a source of suffering. Rather, they have become the very means means through which we deepen who we are, connecting us more fully to the ground of Being itself.
The ground of Being: this is an uncommon phrase. What do we mean by this? What is this ground to which we refer? And what do we mean by Being? The word ground, quite literally, is the ground on which we stand and walk. It is our foundation. In all of our daily doing and being, we rely on the solidity of this ground. Indeed, it is so solid that we are often unaware of it. We go through life taking our ground mostly for granted.
Similarly, Being is so close that it often escapes us. We say that we are, that I am, the table is. We cannot describe any object or subject on this planet without a conjugated form of this verb to be. All that manifests partakes of this quality of Being. As we age, we are afforded the possibility of becoming more familiar with this ground of Being because we recognize more clearly that our lives are finite, that we have lived many years on earth.
This process of connecting our lives more consciously to the ground of Being takes time. Taking time is another way of saying ‘aging’. To age, literally, means that time is taken. The process of aging equals the process of taking our time. All of our growing and learning takes time. It is understood that the formation of a child, it’s education and development into an adult, takes time. Here I am proposing that growing into a full human being also takes time and thus requires of us to age into Old Age. It is through aging that we are afforded the opportunity to become more fully human, that we are able to connect to our ground of Being.
As we age we begin to notice and question the very ground we walk on, the very Being we are. This kind of questioning, philosophical in nature, brings us to a deeper layer of understanding of who we are, of our meaning and purpose.
Facing time turns our minds towards mortality — this is one possibility. Another possibility is to face time and, in so doing, face our eternity. “I am Time”, says Krishna by which the deity refers to the fact that our very existence is in essence spirit. Today this understanding is often antithetical to our understanding of who we think we are. We principally see ourselves as biological creatures made of matter who can decide if there is more to life than biology alone. Our mainstream understanding is that we are our body. Since we experience the body as declining in time, we understand ourselves as declining. Since the body is mortal, we understand ourselves as mortal.
The consequences of this mainstream understanding of ourselves as biological creatures are far reaching. In identifying ourselves as mortal bodies, we have isolated us from the world itself. We have become separate from each other, see the other as outside of us. Not feeling connected to the other, we begin to manipulate it. This manipulation reveals itself in our attitude to our planet and people. From planetary destruction, to wars against other nations and people, seeing ourselves as separate continues to have harmful consequences.
In contrast to this attitude of being separate, stands an awareness that all is interconnected, that, as has been stated poignantly throughout the millennia, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Though this understanding flies in the face of the modern scientific worldview dominating today’s mindset, it has far more backing and support from the wisdom of the ages than does today's materialistic belief-system a mere few hundred years old. From philosophers and mystics, to now theoretical and Quantum physicists, the understanding of our interconnectedness and of some force or energy holding all together, has been expressed time and time again in all of the world’s documented traditions. The thought that the world is an indivisible whole and that a form of spirit and/or energy encompasses us all, are timeless truths.
To age differently means to understand the purpose of our aging, of our lives, as a deepening of our awareness of these timeless truths. Through aging we are afforded the opportunity to grasp the ground of our Being, to experience our interconnectedness, to learn about love and to love – a timely message on this Valentine's day.
Another important aspect of eldership was that elders, though entrusted with the welfare of God’s people, were seen as humans. This meant that they were prone to errors and frailties as all other humans. They were not infallible. Additionally, scripture makes a distinction between elders who ‘rule’ and elders who ‘teach’.
Though scholars have different opinions on this matter, some argue that this distinction was made because of the recognition that some elders were more qualified to rule whereas others were better teachers and preachers. The ability to rule and the ability to teach were seen as distinct qualities, that is they were not understood as complementary. Whereas little is mentioned about how ‘ruling’ elders were to practice for their task, ‘teaching’ elders were definitely called upon to prepare for their role:
“The one elder who, by the force of circumstances, is obliged to pass through a process of preparation to fit himself for his work, finds himself in a position different from the other elders; he has been subjected to a long course of intellectual and moral training; he adopts the pastoral work as the business and pleasure of his life."
This a very brief synopsis of the role elders held and in some important traditions and what qualities were generally associated with them. Even though there are expected differences within different cultures, the overall role and qualities of elders seems to transcend time and space.
Women and Eldership
Given that recorded human history principally has been a history dominated by a patriarchal system of leadership, there is comparatively speaking less record of the role women have played in eldership. The last decades have seen important research and publications, though, highlighting this omission and outlining how women have helped guide individuals and communities throughout human history. These researches have shown that the wisdom of women and their eldership was once revered very highly within human societies. Etymologically, to give just one example, many of the words describing older women today have a derogatory meaning. Whereas ‘hag’ today it refers to an old and decrepit woman, its root meaning is ‘holy’. Crone, a word that meant crown, was once used to refer to a wise woman. Today the word is used to refer to an old, ugly, wrinkled and dependent woman. Another example is the word witch, derived from wit meaning wise. It once referred to young and old women healers. Today the word is filled with negative connotations, applied to women who are suspicious and cannot be trusted, exhibit magical, mostly evil powers. Gregory summarizes this shift as follows:
“The old woman was defined in negative archetypal terms that encompassed body, mind, and spirit and overlapped frequently. She was the hag, the crone, the witch. As hag, the focus was on her decaying body, no longer sexually appealing and now an object of scorn and ridicule. As crone, the wisdom of her mind and life experience were dismissed as cunning and treachery. As witch, in her most intimidating aspect, her aspect of spiritual power, she was condemned as evil incarnate."
One of the reasons given for such a reversal of meaning emphasizes that since the Great Inquisition in the Middle Ages the dominant church shored up their patriarchal power base through the gradual elimination of women’s status in society. States Gregory: “Pan-European evidence suggests that the lives of men and women during the Middle Ages diverged in terms of rights, opportunity, and power. Men were in control, and medieval authors, almost universally male, advanced fictional constructs of women to support their patriarchal social order. The issue was the perpetuation of male rule.”
Such overt domination of one gender over another is slowly giving way to a more balanced view of each gender. Emphasis now is placed more on integrating the diverse archetypal qualities of the masculine and feminine rather then on preferencing one over the other.
"When an elder dies, it's like the burning of a library."
African proverb
There is renewed interest today in the idea of eldership. Eldership refers to a role a person takes within a group or larger community. This person is called an elder and is someone who exhibits certain qualities and traits that help another individual, group or larger community in time of need. The Hebrew 'zah-kehn', the Greek presbuteros and the Latin 'senex' mean the same as the English senior, elder, or aged. The English word Sir or Sire, the Spanish 'Senor', the Italian 'Senior' are derived from 'senex' and show the respect the elder was attributed.
The Greek word 'presbuteros', from which is derived the word Presbyterian, refers in the Old Testament to age and experience translated to English as ‘elder’. Some biblical scholar contend that the word bishop, from the Greek 'episkopos', overseer, is used interchangeably with the word ‘elder’.
Eldership as a role and position within a human community started within the tribal traditions. There we find an emphasis on elders as guides and leaders. Among the Australian Aborigines men slowly move into the status of eldership once they show signs of age, such as gray hair. This indicates that they are experienced and wise and are fit to lead the tribe and teach the young. Elders in the tribe also guide the young with issues such as the selection of jobs for which they see them fit, whether someone has the ability and talent to be a good teacher or the skills to be a hunter. They also resolve tribal concerns and are expected to make final decisions about the direction the tribe will take on various issues.
In the Native American tradition, elders are placed in the highest position of honor and respect a tribe can offer its members. The traits generally associated with elders in this tradition are:
1. knowledge
2. wisdom
3. counseling skills
4. loving heart
5. compassion
6. willingness to teach
7. even temperedness
8. patience
9. and willingness to take on responsibility.
More recently, the term eldership is also found within the Old and New Testament. Within this religious context an elder was thought of as a helper, someone who assisted the priest with communal tasks and responsibilities. The traits of eldership were outlined quite specifically in this tradition. Elders were to be:
1. gentle, not violent
2. not greedy for money
3. respectable
4. loyal to their partner
5. temperate and self-controlled
6 hospitable
7. moderate with alcohol
8. parents who raise their children a believers
9. willing to lead others
10. willing to oversee others
11. not recently converted
12. those with a reputation with outsiders
13. those who love what is good
14. disciplined
15. those who held steady against false beliefs
16. those who led an exemplary life.
In the New Testament the concept of ‘elder’ was sometimes used interchangeably with bishop, overseer and pastor and shows the status an elder held in this tradition. Elders are described as teacher, leader, shepherd and ruler with qualities such as wisdom, maturity, knowledge, honor and balance. They were considered representatives of the people because they were ‘called by God’. The necessity of desire and joy in being an elder is stressed in biblical scripture. It emphasized that elders were elders not only because they were appointed but also because they themselves desired and enjoyed being an elder.
(to be continued)
“As always, the key is to know people’s life histories, adapt the environment, and individualize the routines.”
Allen Power, M.D., Dementia Beyond Drugs (2010)
AgeSong’s commitment to excellence and individualized, holistic, person-centered care is based on the comprehensive knowledge about each resident as a whole person. But often our information is sketchy and makes it difficult to fully meet the needs of each resident. This is particularly important in the case of persons whose cognitive abilities no longer allow them to communicate their needs directly. Given that many of AgeSong's residents struggle with such difficulties, the gathering and organization of such information into a holistic care plan becomes a critical piece towards the fulfillment of AgeSong’s mission.
The holistic care plan covers all aspects of a person’s life: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, relational, historical, cultural. It is highly personal and detailed, including specifics of person’s history, accomplishments, relationships, simple pleasures, interests, daily and night routines, hobbies, personality, likes, dislikes, verbal patterns, languages, travels, living places, work, food preferences, sources of meaning, spiritual beliefs and practices, favorite books and music, sports, favorite objects and material possessions, favorite fragrances, relationship to touch, socio-economics, values, political leanings, favorite games, favorite colors, favorite clothes, . . . We want to know not just what kind of music the person enjoys. We want to know which performer? which songs? Added to the information can be results from Creative-Expressive Abilities Assessment Tool from Gottlieb, Tanaka, Lee, Graf, 2008).
And, the philosopher and pragmatician in me would like to ask ourselves: what do we mean by care? Food for thought.
Our life is finite. This thought and reality has become marginalized in our society. We do not want to talk about it. We do not want to think about it. Rather, we want to fight it through denial, surgery, creams, supplements, fitness programs, cyrogenics. Yes, we will not go silently into the night. We will use all our energy, resources, talents, money, to take on the battle no single human in the history of our 6 billion year old planet has ever won, not a single one, nada. As I am in my mid-fifties with the usual difficulties of everyday life, I have a constant mantram in my head: relax, given that you will die someday, what am I really worried and anxious about? Indeed, from the vantage point of death, I cannot help but feel a big relief – death is the end, the equalizer, the rien va plus.
I love to take pictures, mostly portraits of residents, staff, friends. Invariably, I will be told that I came too close, that they do not look good in pictures, that they are not photogenic. When I remind them that five years from now they will love the picture I take now, they laugh. Yes, that is true, they admit, in five years they will see themselves as part of a time when they were still young, vibrant, handsome or pretty.
What have we done to ourselves? Wherever we are agewise is not good enough. When we are young, we are too inexperienced and immature. When we get more mature we are too old, start lying about our age and/or feel complimented when someone thinks we look younger than we really are.
Now the societal discourse begins to talk about successful, healthy aging. Just as we are beginning to get a little more relaxed about what others are thinking about us, about whether or not we will ever grow up or not, the next pressure arrives on the horizon: successful and healthy aging. Oh, boy, am I doing it right? Am I exercising enough? Am I thinking the right thoughts, eating the appropriate food, reducing enough stressors, getting sufficiently tested for all the important biometrics? Yes, there is such a thing as success in aging. Yes, there is such a thing as healthy aging. Or is there? Who defines these terms? Those who live the longest win? Is it a game of quantity, of who has the most birthdays, has the best blood results?
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that count. We are obsessed with doing life in some right way, following the program, anyone’s program but our own. And this is the issue truly at the heart of our anti-aging sentiments, our desire for youth, staying young indefinitely: we are not living our life. Running after the recipes for life by the many different gurus of the land, moving from one workshop to the other, worrying about whether we are living the right way, keeps us alien from who we really are, what we really need to live our own life the way we desire it, are meant to live it. So, not living our own life, we panic at the thought that we could die without having really lived, that we have not really understood our own meaning and purpose as we kept running after other people’s ideals and dreams.
Stop the running. Be quiet for a moment. Ask yourself: what is important to me if I lived like I will die someday, if I lived like it was really my life I was living? If you can do that you will not wish to live forever. You will say to yourself someday, sooner or later: it was enough. I did it my way. Take me. It is time to rest. Trust me: you will.
These words are by Eknath Easwaran, a spiritual teacher, former UC Berkeley professor, and leader of the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in Tomales, California (see www.easwaran.org).
This is what he writes about love and learning to love, a very timely message as we are heading into the holidays and the next year. These words connect deeply with the AgeSong philosophy of care and to an attitude to which we aspire as an eldercare organization.
Love
It is only by giving up this attempt to put ourselves first that we can find what we really want – peace of mind, lasting relationships, love. Do you remember the children’s game “King of the Mountain” – scrambling up the sand pile, pulling and pushing each other to get on top? That may be all right when we are seven years old, but when we are twenty-seven – or fifty-seven? By the time we become adults, we should begin to think of leaving these scrambling games behind.
Eradicating self-will is the means by which we realize the supreme goal of the spiritual life. This is what all the great mystics have done, and done completely, through years of strenuous effort. True, if we set out to do it, we are going to find it difficult and uncomfortable for a long while. But what freedom we experience when that monstrous impediment we call the ego is finally removed! Says Saint Bernard of Clairvaux:
Just as air flooded with the light of the sun is transformed into the same splendor of light, so that it appears not so much lighted up as to be light itself, so it will inevitably happen that every human affection will then, in some ineffable manner, melt away from self and be entirely transfused . . . . The substance indeed will remain, but in another form, another glory, and another power . . . .
In this self-naughting lies the power of life itself, and through it we are born anew. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “If you want to find your life, you have to lose it.” It is what Gandhi meant when he said, in response to the suggestion that he was without ambition: “Oh, no, I have the greatest ambition imaginable. I want to make myself zero.”
What concrete steps can we take to bring this about? What can we do day by day?
When my grandmother told me about elephantiasis of the ego, I remember I asked her whether there was any cure for this malady. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Love of God.”
Love of God? Some may say it was natural that Granny would use those words, with her devotional Hindu background. You might even hear them among a few pious people in the West. But what can they possibly mean to us? If the materialistic bent of our culture has not banished such devotion, our intellectual training has. How can we conceivably have a fervent love of God in our times? It is a good question, and I think there is a practical answer to it.
First, we need to ask what we mean by “love.” The term has been used so shamelessly in connection with all kinds of things – soft drinks, paper towels, garage door openers. And love between a man and a woman, we are told, means a muscular, tanned fellow running hand in hand through the surf with a stunning, billowy-haired girl, or couples sitting across glasses of wine at a little hideaway restaurant. From such imagery we draw our romantic notions of love.
But listen to Saint Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians:
Love is patient; love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited, nor rude; never selfish, not quick to take offense. Love keeps no score of wrongs; does not gloat over others’ sins, but delights in the truth. There is nothing love cannot face; there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance. Love will never come to an end.
That is a love worthy of us. That is a love powerful enough to dissolve our self-will.
When Jesus urged us to love God, he added also: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” The two interconnect. The Lord is present in every one of us, and when we love those around us, we are loving him. The Hindu scriptures put it memorably:
When a man loves his wife more than himself, he is loving the Lord in her. When a woman loves her husband more than herself, she is loving the Lord in him. When parents love their children more than themselves, they are loving the Lord in them.
Everyone Can Learn to Love
I once spoke to a group of high school girls at a luncheon in Minneapolis. After my talk I answered questions, and the girl who presided asked, “You’ve used the word love many times. What does love mean to you?” I gave her the same answer: “When your boyfriend’s welfare means more to you than your own, you are in love.” This girl turned to the rest of the gathering and said candidly, “Well, I guess none of us has ever been in love.”
I think that can be said for most people. But we can learn to be in love. The spiritual life is marvelously fair: it is open to everybody. No favoritism, no hereditary class. No matter where you start, you can learn everything you need to learn, provided you are prepared to work at it. So too of love. Any one of us may be very self-willed now, but why should we be depressed about it? We can begin the work of eradicating our self-will, and the easiest and most natural way is by putting the welfare of those around us first.
In a sense, it comes down to attention. When we are pre-occupied with ourselves – our thoughts, our desires, our preferences – we cannot help becoming insensitive to others’ needs. We can pay attention only to so much, and all our attention rests on ourselves. When we turn away from ourselves, even if only a little, we begin to see what is really best for those we love.
Hugh, for instance, really looks forward to watching The Wide World of Sports every weekend. He has done it for years. “I’ve had a hard week,” he says, puts up his stockinged feet on the ottoman, and leans back.
But what about his wife, Elaine? Was her week so easy? He might ask her what she would like to do. Go to the beach? Shop? Get the garden started? It might be painful to pry himself away, but if he loves her – and if he wants to grow – he will choose to read the scores in Monday’s paper.
For Hugh it may be The Wide World of Sports that has to be forgone; for another it may be a shopping trip, a nap, a chance to make some extra money, a hobby, an unfinished painting. Whatever it is, giving it up, even temporarily, may hurt. Our preferences are sticky, like the adhesive on a bandage; there may be a wince when we tear them away. But it has to be done if we want to relate easily and lovingly with those around.
Any time we refrain from self-centered ways of acting, speaking and even thinking, we are putting others first. Anger, for example, is often nothing more than violated self-will. Hugh expected a bonus and didn’t get it, so he sulks. Elaine wants their son Jack to stop tinkering with his car and spend more time on his schoolwork, but Jack has other ideas; both get resentful and quarrel. To be blunt, when we are crossed like this by people or events, we do our human equivalent of roaring, baring our fangs, and lashing out with claw, horn, tail, or hoof. The household can become quite a menagerie.
But anger is power, and Hugh, Elaine, and all the rest of us can learn to harness this power by putting each other first. Whatever the flavor of our anger – irritability, rage, stubbornness, belligerence, or sullen silence – it can all be transformed into compassion and understanding. Those we live with will certainly benefit from that, and so will we.
This does not mean that if someone we love tries to do something foolish or injurious, we should ignore it or connive at it by saying, “Whatever you want, dear.” Putting others first does not at all entail making ourselves into a doormat. In fact, if we really love someone, we will find it necessary to speak out for that person’s real and long-term interest – even to the point of loving, tender, but firm opposition.
Often the way we do this makes all the difference. If we are accusing or resentful we will seem entangled, judgmental, just the opposite of loving. Our words, our facial expressions, may betray a lack of respect: “I knew you couldn’t stay on that diet, Hugh!” Even with the best of conscious intentions, we may provoke a nasty clash. But if we can support the other person and express our disapproval tenderly, with respect, it will help him or her to see more clearly. When we have such a helpmate, my grandmother used to say, we do not need a mirror.
Lately I have run across best-selling books encouraging people to compete with each other, even with one’s own husband or wife. Many couples, I hear, have taken this advice. Who brings home the most income? Who has the most promising career? I have even seen couples compete over their friends – or, tragically, for the love of their own children. But a man and woman brought into union are not adversaries. They are meant to complete each other, not to compete. Their union should dissolve separate boundaries – what is bad for one can never be good for the other.
AgeSong is about appreciating and being thankful for all the manifestations we are privy to while being human. It is especially being grateful for those things that seem often not very nice or good or helpful, but almost always turn out to be perfect when viewed from a longer perspective. Can we be thankful for a vision that wants to go beyond good and bad, wants to write a story where we accept forgetting alongside remembering, accept going slow as much as going fast, appreciate our mistakes as much as our successes? For is it not true that all depends on our attitude, really? It is said that comedy equals tragedy plus time. Our so-called mistakes look often as necessary stepping stones in our lives. So, why not appreciate the so-called mistakes now, and not get caught in a judgment of them? As we are entering this Thanksgiving week of 2011, we can look at all we are and have been given as a blessing, beyond good and bad. No matter how difficult we think our life and/or circumstances might be for us now, there will always be many more people whose lives are even more difficult and painful. So, let's take a step back and try to be grateful for this amazing life we have been given - every moment is precious, indeed, if we decide to see it that way.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Nader
Part Nine: A New Poem for the Future
The discussion about a new way of looking at aging as maturing, as a deepening of who we are as a human being, and the different way of looking at dementia as an entering into our soulfulness, are both grounded in a dialogue about a fundamentally different attitude toward life itself. This attitude is one that is curious about our differences as people and attentive to our tendency to judge and reject what does not fit our sense of normality. It is aware that there is no fixed, immutable reality and that any truth is always connected to the individual perception of the human being. And this new attitude understands that human relationship as it expresses itself in the care and love for our fellow human being is the primary force behind a life worth living. This applies especially to the way we care for those amongst us who are dependent on our care, whatever form that care may take and wherever it may take place. For whether we speak of emergency medical care, emotional care, or care for our elders at home and/or in communities, it is the personal, human relationship which has shown again and again to be a central agent for a healthful life.
I am emphasizing this point for in the care of the aged and the care for those with symptoms of forgetfulness increasingly attention and resources are placed in the medical treatment model. The latter stresses medication management and thinks too little of the importance of human connection. The quality of this connection is often less determined by doing than by being present with the other. Being present is a state of being not governed by time and outcome but rather by allowing whatever is taking place between two people to take place. This implies being with a person without judgment, a quality of presence that continually challenges one’s commonly held personal and cultural assumptions, ideas, and preferences. Such a disposition to the other challenges each one of us to a larger understanding of ourselves and the world within which we live. Foremost it teaches us acceptance of what is rather than displeasure of what is not. As importantly, it teaches us acceptance of our own aging process which might include a dosage of forgetfulness or not. For the more we can accept what is outside of us, the more we can accept all that we are as individuals. Seeing the beauty of elders in front of us, glancing lovingly at them, will make it easier, no doubt, to look into the mirror in the morning and accept and love ourselves as we change into our own elderhood. Similarly, as we become appreciative of the world that opens up to us through people with forgetfulness and their different ways of communicating, so we, too, become more accepting of our own changes, physically and mentally, as we move along our aging process.
The new poem of the future, then, will be one that understands our human differences no longer as a phenomenon to be normalized or cured but rather as an opportunity to deepen our awareness of our amazing diversity and purposes. This new poem will not only accept but celebrate our differences in the world as we become ever more curious about how we keep changing and diverging from known ways. Such a stance relates to being more open and cognizant of our soul dimension, an awareness that remembers the mystery of life alongside our advances in manipulating it. This new poem also remembers that the core of human, perhaps of all earthly life, is based on our ability to give and receive care, to give and receive love – especially with respect to what is not so easily cared for and loved. As the great sages and mystics have reiterated throughout the millennia, this kind of service might be one of the more fundamental meanings of our life.
Part Eight: The Question of Identity
We humans have become accustomed to think of ourselves in a modern scientific way. This means that we identify with what we can recognize with our senses and measure in our biographies such as the way our bodies look and feel, how we experience others and the world, notice where we come from, what we have accomplished, perhaps still want to achieve. Few of us think in terms of our essential self, that part we experience not with our senses but in a different way. This essential self some call soul, sometimes also the spirit that resides within. We know of this through that inner voice that speaks in the middle of the night, through the hunches we have as we walk through life, through what guides us inexplicably hither or thither, moves us in ways we will often only understand much later in life. This essence or soul forms part of our identity. It does not leave us just because our body ages, our cognitive abilities change. On the contrary, more often than not it is because our bodies move less fast and our minds less quickly that our essential selves can even emerge and become visible through the haste of the day and the noise of the mind. Understood as such what is called dementia can be seen as a gift rather than a curse in a person’s life.
Next Week: A New Poem for the Future
Greetings from the Goldcoast here in Australia where I am presenting at a Conference on Aging. Specifically, the conference organizers asked me to speak about AgeSong's unique approach to forgetfulness care (the medical community and many others call 'dementia'). In thinking about how to distill our unique AgeSong approach to forgetful elders, I fall back to the one central and fundamental choice we humans have in life: our attitude. Really, when we think about it, the one aspect about our life over which we have control is how we want to view life, our own and that of others. How we look at life makes all the difference. Remember the movie Life is Beautiful where actor Roberto Benigni – also the director of the film – protects his son by pretending that survival in the concentration camp is an elaborate game. Similarly, we can take a look at what is called 'dementia' as a terrible disease where we will understand each action of the 'demented' as sign of his or her 'dementia' - and subsequently cannot help but burden the so afflicted with our sad looks, or we can look at the condition of forgetting as one all of us experience. We can even go so far as to understand forgetting as a gift and/or blessing as it frees us from many of the earthly constraints that burden us so-called normal people. If we look at the forgetful elder as being gifted by forgetfulness, understand his or her condition as a different state of awareness, then we look at the elder with curiosity and loving appreciation. This attitude forgetful elders will feel as our eyes rest on them - not pity or sadness, even despair, will be in our eyes, in our behavior, but wonderment and interest to learn more about who they are.
Now, wouldn't you and I prefer to be looked at with eyes of curiosity and love, and not with eyes that see us as diseased? I think this might be worth pondering more deeply.
Blessings, Nader Shabahangi
Part Seven: Writing Our Poem
We have learned in the last few hundred years, thanks to science and philosophy, that human perception co-creates reality. Since each of us has their own unique perception, we have as many realities as we have individual perceptions – no one person sees the colors red and blue, for example, quite the same way, looks at a dog or cat with quite the same eyes and feelings. This awareness that perception equals each person’s reality has fundamental implications, one of which states that there does not exist one universal truth, that truth does not exist outside of us. In contrast, we humans create our own truth, a truth that is ever changing, shifting, and transforming with time, with our learning, experiencing and growing. This awareness thus leads us to conclude that truth is always of a personal nature and such truth is told through the story or poem we tell to ourselves and others.
How we tell our poem can have a large impact on us. Imagine if you feel fortunate about how you grew up or you feel that your upbringing might have precluded you from being all you wanted to be in life. One poem uplifts, the other can depress you. A case in point is melancholia, a condition we now call depression. In the time of the Greek Empire, melancholic people who moped around the house, sat all day at some table or in some chair with their head leaning heavy on one of the hands, was considered a gift by the Olympian Gods. For, so the poem of that time told, melancholic people have the god-given luxury of contemplating the plight of the earth, of thinking about the weight of being human, the burden of being alive. Today we treat people who are melancholic, now called depressed, with anti-depressants, call it a disease. In a culture that is based on productivity and efficiency, based on activity and achievement, sitting around moping and reflecting on the complexity and depth of the world must invariably be considered as abnormal, a disease.
The Poem called Dementia
The power of a poem is also evident in how we “see”, for example, a symptom of aging we call dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. In calling it a disease I have already given the conclusion of the poem: I prejudge this phenomenon as undesirable. In labeling something as a disease I state that it does not belong to me, that it has, in fact, no meaning for me and for my life.
What we label dementia is a poem written largely by people who believe in the myth called objective science. I say myth because there is no objectivity, as stated above, and there is not a uniform understanding about what we mean by science. Both concepts, that of objectivity and that of science, are part of a poem that has been written and re-told in-numerous times in the last few hundred years, to the point that many of us equate those stories written with objective truth. However, just as the many religions, as the theory of the big bang, of creationism, of evolution, of objective science, are stories, form mythologies of some kind or another, so the poem of dementia, of Alzheimer’s disease, forms part of a myth, of a story told.
Enter the world of dementia, of no-mind. Never mind that we humans have yet to understand the nature of mind, that mind is a concept we invented in order to explain something for which we have no answer yet, that in some cultures a state of no-mind is considered the highest possible state of enlightenment. Never mind all that. In creating the myth of dementia, the poem of no-mind, we impose our sense of normality on those who are different from us. In a cognitively oriented society such as ours, anyone who does not talk and think and remember as fast and efficient as the mainstream must be abnormal, must be wrong, diseased.
The Poem of Forgetting
We can also write a different poem. This is the poem of forgetting, a poem of traveling to a different planet, to new and exciting worlds of which most of us earthlings and mainstreamers know little, as of yet.
Imagine this different world, explore it. If you consider your life a poem you are in the process of creating, then the adventure that awaits you on the journey to a different planet might feel exciting to you. After all, such a journey provides you with new material for writing your poem, can help you create a whole new verse. As in the story of The Little Prince who lives on planet B612, we travel to other planets in order to discover what the rest of the world is like. On those planets we meet people who possess different ways of viewing themselves and the planet on which they live. Through these travels we recognize how each of us writes their own poem, some of which we can comprehend, others which we can’t.
In The Little Prince, for example, the fox expresses what the protagonist of the story, the little Prince, learns through his travels, that is through his openness to other worlds: "On ne voit pas bien qu'avec le coeur, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux." (One cannot see well except with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes). There is another point spoken by the fox that is important understanding for the little Prince: "It is the time you have spent with your rose that makes your rose so important."
This, indeed, is a different poem from the one many of us know, most of us write. This poem brings us to a different region, the region of the invisible, what other stories might refer to as soul. If the essential is invisible to the eyes and the essential can be called soul, then what might lie ahead of us if we undertake a journey to the soul? On what planet does a person who forgets, who has no-mind, live? What if we saw forgetfulness not as a disease but as an entryway to soulfulness?
Next Week: The Question of Identity
Part Six: Toward a Different Understanding of Life
No doubt, as a culture and people we are ready to establish a new, more complex and rich understanding of life and aging. This understanding will move beyond the superficial, surface layers of what we perceive of as optimal, bio-medically measured functioning to a more comprehensive view of the human being. This view pays equal attention to the socio-psycho-spiritual-somatic dimensions of a human life and will regard the attainment of what have proven to be timeless human virtues to be the measure of a person’s standing in the world. From this new point of view we will start to look at life as a complete poem, one that has its highpoint with a human being’s last stanza or verse. Aging understood as such is an active process of becoming, learning and growing. We do not get old but grow old.
The role we grow into as we age is that of the elder. The final stanza of our life poem is that of eldership, the apex of a lifetime of learning and experiencing, of struggle and concern, of being courageous and creative. From the point of view of an elder, young and middle age are seen as the time we wrote important parts of our poem that would lay the groundwork for the final verses written in our eldership years. The struggles of middle age, for example, focused on the dynamic between our inner and outer lives, a struggle that centered around the balance to grow our inner capacities as human beings as well as developing further our standing in the world. The challenge of eldership is to give back to our human community the depth we have gained through the joys and toils of a lived life. From the poetics of aging point of view, all the years of life are understood as important and necessary building blocks for our final, climactic years of eldership.
Next Week: Writing Our Poem
We need to challenge the way we view aging. Speaking with a group of elders at the St. Mary’s Medical Hospital, I took part of a talk series that highlights various health concerns for members of the community. My presentation was called “Adventures in Aging,” a talk that focused on the ways that elders find meaning and vitality in the process of aging.
Inviting participants to share something about themselves, prompted several lively stories of both struggle and exuberance from the audience members. I related my own narrative of being raised by my grandparents, and how his experience of visiting nursing care facilities in America was in stark contrast to the way I saw elders while growing up in Germany. This insight made me decide to develop a place that offered something very different, a valuing of elders for what they offer our society and to the deepening of all of our lives.
This vision was given the name AgeSong, a group of assisted living communities in the Bay Area guided by the philosophy that the aging process is to be celebrated and sung. The mainstream view, in contrast, understands older people as no longer useful. AgeSong wants to create a shift in attitude, one where life is getting better as we age—we become deeper and wiser. This is why the AgeSong communities promote ongoing learning, personal growth, and creative expression for their residents.
Questions to the audience posed where: “‘Adventures in Aging’ is about asking ‘What is life about—how do we derive purpose at 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 and beyond? How do we shift into our own internal culture that values the wisdom of older age?”
Participants responded with a variety of themes. Some reported “feeling invisible in society, especially to young people.” One participant expressed her wish to be useful: “Inside, I want to be somebody who changes things. I don’t know how to do that.” Other themes included the process of adjusting to an ever-changing (and uncooperative) body, and the difficulty letting go of a previous sense of physical beauty.
One lively participant had a particularly poignant message for her fellow audience members: “I consider this a time in my life to be good to me—I spent my whole life taking care of others, and now I’m taking the attitude of ‘Me first!’” I echoed that many elders in the AgeSong communities see their later years as a time for self-reflection, contemplation, and enjoy the greater freedom that their earlier responsibilities did not afford.
Several participants also emphasized the importance of staying engaged and connected to other people. One audience member pointed out that older age brings the loss of friends and family members, making it necessary to re-people one’s world. Another participant spoke fondly of her weekly visits as a volunteer at the animal shelter. Many group members shared their knowledge of different San Francisco-based organizations that promote a sense of connection and community for seniors, most notably San Francisco Village.
Participants were then asked what they found significant about getting older. Responses included “I can start to understand myself,” “I know how to help others better,” “I know more,” and “I can be forgiving with myself.” Others talked about old age as a time for re-prioritizing one’s life, a time to let the soul mature.
The final theme of the talk was challenging mainstream fears of dependency. Many people are more afraid of being dependent on someone else, than of dying. However, dependency is inevitable—we just don’t see all the ways we are already dependent upon things outside our control. I encouraged the audience to see interdependency as a natural process: The attitude shift toward care giving and care receiving is in learning to see it as a gift—a gift of learning how to care for another, rather than caring as a burden.
Blessings, Nader Robert Shabahangi, Ph.D.
Part Five: Toward a Poetics of Aging
Many cultures possess a role called eldership as a way to honor those who have attained culturally cherished virtues through a life-time of learning, growing and experiencing. But more than honor the achievement of elderhood, many of our cultures understood the value such persons held for counsel and guidance of its people.
The poetics of aging and life, then, is not a process that understands its completion somewhere in the middle of life, a place where our dominant paradigm places it with expressions such as being in the prime of life, at the highpoint of a career, at the peak of one’s power. Rather, the poetics of aging wants to express that the poem called ‘my life’ finds its final stanza, its completion, only at the very end of life. To look at a poem half or two-thirds completed is to look at a fragment, is to misunderstand the meaning of the whole.
From this vantage point we might understand the nonsensicality of looking at our later and last years as declining years, years that are supposedly less valuable than those before. This decline-metaphor permeates much of our culture, often visible to us, at other times entering our awareness in more subtle ways. It is a metaphor that derives its understanding principally from looking at aging and life from the outside; that is by looking at our bodies. In so doing, this metaphor of decline upholds a certain image of the body as more desirable than another.
Besides evaluating our bodies, this decline-metaphor also evaluates our cognitive abilities in order to judge our up or down trajectory in the world. For example, do we remember quickly or at all, do we speak a language coherently or not, do we meet normative standards of social engagement or don’t we? These measures alongside the perception of our bodies form a way of how we continue to judge a person’s value to us and to our culture today.
Next Week: Toward a Different Understanding of Life
Part Four: The Role of Eldership and Timeless Human Virtues
In the last centuries we have seen a gradual deconstruction of universal belief systems, what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of all values. Those earlier belief systems did not require of the individual an introspection of his or her own deeply held values and convictions. On the contrary, adaptation to commonly held beliefs was understood as the hallmark of good citizenry and required of most of us.
The 20th century, especially, saw a further erosion and abandonment of universal systems of faith. This process, now and then, has increasingly left individuals to search for guidance themselves as to the principles with which to live their lives. Today many of us derive our guidance from observing individuals who have managed to live a life we admire. They possess qualities such as patience, humility, courage, and compassion. They also seem to accept others, value human experience and have an understanding of the limits of knowledge and of being human. Again, because these qualities are rarely obtained at a young age through schooling or other forms of education, but rather take a lifetime of experience and learning to achieve and practice, those people are often referred to as elders. Even though it is not necessary to have entered Old Age to be an elder, more often than not this is the case. Conversely, being in Old Age does not make an elder. Rather, it is exactly those who have made the effort throughout their lives to grow and deepen themselves, have made a commitment to become aware and accept the struggles and sufferings alongside the joys and pleasures of life, who can be regarded elders in our society.
Next Week: Toward a Poetics of Aging
Part Three: A New Phenomenon - Living Older
Only in our recent generations have we humans enjoyed a longer life-span, that is the ability to grow in ever greater numbers to an age far beyond our socially instituted retirement age. In the last hundred years those living in so-called developed countries have nearly doubled their life expectancy. Even more dramatic is the fact that for much of recorded human history the average life expectancy did not exceed that of late youth.
This exponential increase in our average life-span confronts us today with the need to come to terms with this phenomenon called Old Age. And coming to terms with it we must. For some reason we do not think, yet, of later adulthood as a time for learning and growth. Though we have images of wise elders in our history, such images seem to us to belong to mostly exceptional human beings, not to who we are.
This is the challenge that confronts us now. In order to accept Old Age as another phase of learning and growing, we need to exit from the attitude that literally devalues our aging process. This devaluing takes place because we do not yet see the value of aging and old age for us and society. This devaluation, especially of the aging that occurs in our later years, not only has the effect of creating an anti-aging sentiment in our culture, but also diminishes the human values or virtues that most often are present only in old age.
Next Week: The Role of Eldership and Timeless Human Virtues
In our busy lives and struggles we often lose the value of caring support as a basic expression of our humanity. This value shows itself especially in our attitude to elders today.
We often witness that care has turned into a routine or mechanical act. Care is understood more as a burden, something to be done that takes our time away from something more important. Imagine if we could shift our attitude to care, if we could understand it as the very essence of our lives.
Specifically, this would mean that:
• the person for whom you care is your emotional and spiritual teacher;
• our emotional, physical and spiritual well-being are inseparable and ought to be sustained as a whole;
• through our concern we remember that our deepest need is as much to give as to receive supportive care;
• in caring for others we experience our relatedness to Being.
Blessings, Nader Robert Shabahangi, Ph.D.
Part Two: Poetry and the Creative Process
In speaking of the poetics of aging I would like to remind the reader of the very meaning of the word poesis. With poesis the ancient Greeks referred to the act of making, of creating. To speak of the poetics of aging, then, is to speak – expressed quite literally – of creating aging, of being actively engaged in the aging process. Given the inseparability of life and aging, to speak of the poetics of aging is to speak thus also of the poetics of life.
The poetics of aging views our existence as a creative process of making a life. It is based on the belief that we humans possess an innate desire and will to deepen our understanding of who we are, of our purpose and meaning. It is interesting to note that when we are in our youth the process of aging is synonymous with growing up, with learning, with becoming more aware, more of an adult.
The process of aging is equivalent to the process of changing. We might even go as far as to replace the word “aging” with the word “changing”, a substitution that does not alter the conceptual meaning of aging. The expression “I am changing” captures the same essence as the statement “I am aging”. Yet, the latter contains more often than not a burdened meaning showing the degree to which we have given the word aging a biased, derogatory meaning. This bias begins sometime around middle adulthood – though there are signs in popular culture that such bias is entering even early adulthood.
Next Week: Part Three: A New Phenomenon - Living Older
Read:
Part One: The Starting Point: Our Mainstream View of Aging and Dementia Today
San Francisco-based AgeSong Institute has organized a grassroots gathering of pro-aging performing artists, directors, writers and advocates for the inaugural Poetics of Aging conference Nov. 16-19, 2011, to celebrate and explore elderhood and aging as the basis for depth and wisdom.
Organized in collaboration with Bay Area universities and local and national aging services organizations (including Dr. Bill Thomas’ Eden Alternative organization and the ChangingAging Blogstream), the mission of the conference is to counter the belief that aging is decline and/or disease and to promote a new understanding of old age as a time of growth and potential, not in spite of living longer, but because of it.
The conference will feature speakers and performers highlighting each day’s theme, including a panel discussion on the politics of aging featuring ChangingAging Editor Kavan Peterson. Featured speakers include John Gray (Men are from Mars), Dick Bolles (What Color Is Your Parachute), Rev Cecil Williams (Glide Memorial), John Krumboltz (Happenstance), Nader Shabahangi (AgeSong), Patrick Fox (UCSF) and others interested in exploring the beauty and depth of life at any stage and age.
Lead speakers will be joined by workshop, roundtable and poster presenters. The gathering will also showcase a bevy of professional talent, from stage directors and professors to actors, musicians and improv groups.
Follow updates on the Poetics of Aging Conference on changingaging.org/blog/tag/agesong.
Visit Poetics of Aging Conference website, poeticsofaging.org.
A Special Nine-Part Series on Authoring our Lives As We Age
In this thought-provoking series. Nader Shabahangi, co-founder of AgeSong Senior Communities and noted author and guest lecturer, suggests a unique view of aging.
Focusing on the process of aging, he examines the manner in which we age and the meaning(s) we create while we go through the various stages of life. Using poetry as a vehicle for meaning-making in aging, Dr. Shabahangi’s insights shine a fresh light on how we can apply ourselves creatively, and author our life story as we age.
Part One: The Starting Point: Our Mainstream View of Aging and Dementia Today
A core tenet of humanistic psychology and philosophy is the belief that human life is intrinsically significant. This meaningfulness extends to all we do and are in life. It is evident in our creative expressions, in our work, in the choices we make, in the way we keep writing and rewriting our life stories. It is also evident in the way we age, that we age.
Though this seems an obvious insight to many, we need to remember only the intense cultural opposition to aging that shows itself not only in promotion of anti-, and “successful aging” campaigns but, perhaps most poignantly, in the publications by more and more members of the scientific establishment. Those writings, in the name of modern science, tend to bio-medicalize aging i.e. look at aging from a standpoint of biology only.
Such a limited viewpoint can create the impression that aging is a disease ignoring the many other dimensions of human development and growth associated with growing older. This is not the place to cite the in-numerous literature attesting to this conception and movement. Rather, I would like to point out the fact that not only popular culture but. increasingly also, members of our own and of other research and professional communities are proposing that aging, phrased succinctly, is something to be overcome, can be cured or fixed.
Of course, this perspective raises a host of questions that have us enter into quite sensitive and risky territory: at what point or age, do we start treating and curing aging? What do we do with those who do not respond to treatment? What about those who do not want treatment? How do we know when treatment is successful? What measures do we use: those of biology, psychology, anthropology?
From a humanistic, poetic point of view, life and aging have meaning. The very processes of life and aging cannot be separated. Without aging there is no life, without life there is no aging. As absurd as this sounds, to propose anti-aging is to propose antilife, to believe that aging is a disease is to state that life is a disease.
It is tempting to ask the question and explore further how it is we humans managed to create such a life-negating, one might even say, absurd viewpoint. This questioning must remain, however, the subject of a separate inquiry. Here I would like to focus on the possibility of creating a different attitude toward aging, one I would like to call the poetics of aging.
In conjunction with the poetics of aging, I would like to address also the mainstream conception of dementia, often linked to the process of aging. Dementia or Alzheimer’s, in much of today’s scientific and popular publications, is understood principally as a dreadful disease with little, if any, redeeming value. This understanding goes against the experiences many caregivers make in working with those showing signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. In contrast to those speaking about a dreadful disease, they tell a different story reporting that people with dementia – given a loving environment and care – can be content and happy individuals who are spontaneous, funny and wise. This is a rarely spoken poem or story of dementia and Alzheimer’s to which I will voice to in this series as well.
Next Week: Poetry and the Creative Process
How do we remain conscious of the ways in which we impose our own fears of aging, of death, of the changes that invariably occur as we age, onto elders themselves? If we ask ourselves to face our own fears of aging and dying, maybe we can begin to understand how these fears express themselves in our interactions with, and attitudes toward, our elders.
Can we remain open to what they have to offer us, not only because they have more life experience than we do, but also because they are often entrusted in our care? How does our contact with elders inform our awareness of our own inner Elders? How is the whole topic of elders important to those of us in the younger generations?
All these questions and more are important to bring awareness to our fears of aging. Facing these questions, having an open dialogue about them, is the first step towards a life that celebrates who we are at any age.
You don’t have to go out the door
To know what goes in the world.
You don’t have to look out of the window
To see the way of heaven.
The farther you go,
The less you know.
So the wise soul
doesn’t go, but knows;
Doesn’t look, but sees;
Doesn’t do, but gets it done.
Wise elders have a sense of what wants and needs to happen, not because of their own wishes and desires, but because they are in tune with the larger process that has been given many names: Nature, Tao, Unconscious, Process, Spirit, and/or God. By being in tune with this process, doing becomes effortless, becomes not-doing. This is what Lao Tzu means when he writes that the wise soul doesn’t do, but gets it done.
To be in tune with the process we need to slow down else we do not notice the subtle signals all around us. These signals – whether they occur within or without us – tell us whether we are in tune or not, are following the process or not.
Slowing down is the prerequisite for becoming still. We need to be still to be open to listening. The ability to listen is the central requirement to follow the process. The wise soul knows this. Our elders today are the wise souls we all need to live peaceful and content lives.
Blessings and Thank you- Nader Shabahangi, Founder, AgeSong
Elders have developed the keen ability to see the long view of life. Through all the years of experience, through the many trials, joys and tribulations, elders have understood about the ebb and flow of life, that change takes time, especially as far as human attitudes, dispositions and beliefs are concerned. They have thus developed patience and a sense of equanimity. The long view of life understands about the limits of knowledge, its cyclical nature, and that knowledge is more often than not rooted in an individual’s feelings and perception. This awareness brings forth an appreciation of how much is unknown, cannot be known. It gives rise to what we call awe – a stance towards the world which is filled with amazement about the miraculous nature of this world and everything that exists.
An attitude of awe looks at the world and existence with a deep sense of gratitude and acceptance. It understands that life is not about the things themselves but about how we see them, about our attitude towards what is present in front of us. An attitude of awe realizes that life is filled with mysteries, that life itself is a mystery.
Poets, philosophers, teachers, elders, neighbors, friends, animals and even the unspoken parts of ourselves often offer words of wisdom that can, at just the moment we need it, spark an idea, a reflection, an understanding, an emotion, that will take us in just the direction our minds, bodies and spirits need to go in.
We hope the Words of Wisdom Project will encourage you to offer your own words of wisdom through musings@agesong.com.
Blessings and Thank you- Nader Shabahangi, Founder, AgeSong
Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.
But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?
Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.
When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,
as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?
-from Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early (2004)
Dear Reader - this is an amazing article about the value, courage, wisdom and strength of our elders.
Enjoy!
Nader
TOKYO — By any measure, the thousands of people toiling to cool the crippled nuclear reactors in Fukushima are engaged in jobs that the Japanese consider kitanai, kitsui and kiken, or dirty, difficult and dangerous.
Seemingly against logic, Yasuteru Yamada, 72, is eager for the chance to take part. After seeing hundreds of younger men on television struggle to control the damage at the Daiichi power plant, Mr. Yamada struck on an idea: Recruit other older engineers and other specialists to help tame the rogue reactors.
Not only do they have some of the skills needed, but because of their advanced age, they are at less risk of getting cancer and other diseases that develop slowly as a result of exposure to high levels of radiation. Their volunteering would spare younger Japanese from dangers that could leave them childless, or worse.
“We have to contain this accident, and for that, someone should do the work,” said Mr. Yamada, a retired plant engineer who had worked for Sumitomo Metal Industries. “It would benefit society if the older generation took the job because we will get less damage from working there.”
Weeks after the devastating earthquake and tsunami struck, he and Nobuhiro Shiotani, a childhood friend who is also an engineer, formed the Skilled Veterans Corps in early April. They sent out thousands of e-mails and letters, and even set up a Twitter account. On his blog, bouhatsusoshi.jp/english, Mr. Yamada called on people over age 60 who have “the physical strength and experience to bear the burden of this front-line work.”
The response was instant. About 400 people have volunteered, including a singer, a cook and an 82-year-old man. Some 1,200 others have offered support, while donations have topped 4.3 million yen, or $54,000. His blog has been translated into 12 languages.
Although Mr. Yamada, a soft-spoken cancer survivor, started with a simple goal, he has triggered a much wider debate about the role of the elderly in Japan, the meaning of volunteerism and the growing reality that the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the reactors, will face an increasingly difficult time recruiting workers. Some experts expect that Japan will ultimately import laborers to help with the cleanup. More than 3,000 workers, many of them poorly paid part-timers, are at the Daiichi site. Already, several have suffered heat stroke and nine have absorbed more than their legal limit of radiation. Dozens of workers have stopped showing up.
Mr. Yamada and his group have been described as selfless patriots surrendering for the greater good, mindless kooks willing to throw themselves in harm’s way, or pensioners with too much leisure time. The descriptions miss the point, according to Mr. Shiotani, who had a more practical idea in mind.
“Nuclear power plants are the brainchild of scientists and engineers,” he said. “They created this mess, and they have to fix it.”
In conditions this dangerous, wanting to help and being allowed to help are different things. Some lawmakers initially scoffed at the volunteers, including Goshi Hosono, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who told reporters last month that the work in Fukushima did not yet require a “suicide corps.”
“It is very precious that they sacrifice their lives and volunteer to resolve this situation,” Mr. Hosono later explained. But “they are at a certain age, so we don’t want them to get sick after working in such a dangerous environment with full face masks.”
But in a country starved for feel-good stories, the Skilled Veterans Corps has captured the hearts of many. Requests for interviews have poured in from around the world. Politicians have slowly come on board. On June 6, Mr. Yamada met Banri Kaieda, the minister of economy, trade and industry, who promised to help the volunteers before their “enthusiasm burns out.”
“I thought, what a brave idea when so many Japanese and non-Japanese are afraid to go to Fukushima,” said Hiroe Makiyama, a Parliament member in Mr. Kan’s Democratic Party of Japan who is helping promote the project. “No one intends to die there. They don’t really want to do this, but they feel they have to do this.”
Mr. Yamada got so busy working from home that he found some office space in a narrow walk-up in Tokyo’s Shimbashi neighborhood. In a spartan room with a couple of computers, a hot water pot and a few folding chairs, Mr. Yamada and his team are applying to become a nonprofit group and awaiting approval of their application to visit the Daiichi plant in July.
Mr. Yamada and Mr. Shiotani say the hardest part of their jobs may be dealing with officials at Tokyo Electric Power, or Tepco, as it is known. As engineers, they understand that their counterparts, who undoubtedly are very busy, likely will have bruised egos, given the scale of the damage and the tumbling status of the company.
But unlike high-paid consultants and vendors, the Skilled Veterans Corps has nothing to sell but ideas and hard work. As volunteers, they do not have a conflict of interest and can speak openly, they say. Still, Mr. Yamada and Mr. Shiotani recognize that they must be humble. Yoshimi Hitotsugi, a spokesman for Tepco, said that the company is “highly appreciative” of the offers of help, but that it is still deciding what the volunteers are capable of doing and how to ensure their safety.
Mr. Yamada, an avid bicyclist, said he did not expect to start working at the Daiichii plant until autumn because of the intense heat and humidity during the summer. Ever the engineer, he said that no one, not even older workers, should do anything hastily.
“We won’t take any reckless or meaningless action,” he said. “We won’t do fruitless work.”
Yasuko Kamiizumi contributed reporting.
While at a Stagebridge luncheon yesterday (www.stagebridge.org), sponsored in part by AgeSong, Anita Goldstein was in the audience. She heard about our upcoming conference Poetics of Aging (www.poeticsofaging.org) this November and was reminded of the following, so beautifully written piece on the importance of Old Age and aging. Written in 1961 by Abraham Joshua Heschel, it captures so amazingly well what our conference in November, our AgeMarch this October (www.agemarch.com), and our Gems of Wisdom project (www.agesong.com/gems-of-wisdom.html) want to promote and express. Here is the excerpt:
"May I suggest that human beings’ potential for change and growth is much greater than we are willing to admit and that old age be regarded not as the age of stagnation but as the age of opportunities for inner growth? Old people must not be treated as patients, nor regard their retirement as a prolonged state of resignation.
The years of old age may enable us to attain the high values we failed to sense, the insights we have missed, the wisdom we ignored. They are indeed formative years, rich in possibilities to unlearn the follies of a lifetime, to see through inbred self-deceptions, to deepen understanding and compassion, to widen the horizon of honesty, to refine the sense of fairness.
One ought to enter old age the way one enters the senior year at a university, in exciting anticipation of consummation. Rich in perspective, experienced in failure, people advanced in years are capable of shedding prejudices and the fever of vested interests. They do not see anymore in every fellow human a person who stands in their way, and competitiveness may cease to be their way of thinking.
We must seek ways to overcome the traumatic fear of being old, the prejudice, the discrimination against those advanced in years. All human beings are created equal, including those advanced in years. Being old is not necessarily the same a being stale. The effort to restore the dignity of old age will depend on our ability to revive the equation of old age and wisdom. Wisdom is the substance upon which the inner security of the old will forever depend. But the attainment of wisdom is the work of a life time."
Abraham Joshua Heschel
(1961)
A "Good" Dose of Reality from the "Actuarially Challenged"
I am writing to convey some words about one of the most uplifting experiences I have had yet at AgeSong at Lake Merritt. If I did not "get it" before, I do now! What I mean by that is the "Elder Academy," the "wisdom" from seniors, and the importance of seniors to work hard at being "fiercely" independent.
Most all of my day and a fair amount of the early evening was spent at AgeSong at Lake Merritt meeting with staff about some maintenance items, touring the property with our new Executive Director in order to give her some of my thinking about the physical plant, and meeting with an Executive Chef candidate. The chef discussion went much longer than I expected, and with very little sleep, I felt disappointed that I was unable to get all the details completed.
So, I decided that I would do what works for nearly everyone when feeling a little bad.............and go to the Terrace Room and look at the enchanting and soothing view. It was already early dinner time and Florence ( a resident) was sitting alone at a dining table ordering her food. I poured a cup of coffee for myself and sat and chatted with her. Before too long, Dick, Helen, and Mr and Mrs G (all residents) joined. I had a splendid time! We talked frankly about life and living at AgeSong at Lake Merritt. They adore it! It was made clear to me that they do not want too much help, but love the programming, and find the residents to be so engaging. It was conveyed to me that some of them were worried about living in congregate housing because they would feel obligated to always be social. But, they have figured out that if they want to turn off the world one day they get to stay in their "beautiful apartment," and then get re-engaged as they choose the next day.
I was told repeatedly how unique AgeSong at Lake Merritt is and that they think it is so beautiful.
I mentioned the most recent article I found on the internet about AgeSong at Lake Merritt and how it mentioned that our residents are at AgeSong at Lake Merritt because they are "fiercely independent and hip." They were beaming with that comment. Helen was pretty funny, as she said, "Yeah, let's hope they are not right and we have no broken hips!"
We talked about the community growing and how Patty has done great job carrying the torch thus far, but the need is now here for a full-time director. They "get it" and have enjoyed their limited interactions with or new leader thus far. The residents are in our corner in terms of the desire to be successful, and are cheerleaders in the quest to get to 40+ senior residents. They wanted re-assurance that we have no future plans to change what we are doing.
Dick mentioned how appreciative he is for the work Patty did to help him with the interpersonal issues he had. We also told Dick how wonderful it is that he was able to step-up and get through that. He was beaming again.
By the time I excused myself from the table, I had a smile on my face and felt a very warm glow from an entirely enjoyable and engaging conversation with this group of what Dick calls "actuarially challenged" people. They all said they do not like being referred to as "seniors."
Here is the picture I left with....................On a Friday night, there were 50+ in the bar lounge (age maybe 30-55, plus Lorraine), and maybe no less than 70 feet away, there were a few tables of AgeSong at Lake Merritt senior residents eating dinner. Talk about "intergenerational!"
I think you get my point by now...............a long day, but I left with a smile and warm, fuzzy feelings that what has been created and we are doing is right, and I would never have believed you a few years ago...............but I was re-energized by a group of "actuarially challenged" people. I slept like a "baby."
Randy
Perhaps elders move slower, but they know where they are going.
Perhaps elders take longer to decide, but their decisions feel wiser.
Perhaps they think less quickly, but their thoughts are more insightful.
Perhaps their eyesight is not as sharp, but their vision is more profound.
Perhaps their hearing has lessened, but they know what is worth listening to.
Perhaps they struggle with modern technology, but they understand more about the mystery of life.
This week I am out at the AgeSong communities of San Francisco and Oakland, singing, speaking and working on the Presence Project. I'll be teaming up with mindfulness expert Marguerite Manteau-Rao, AgeSong CEO Dr. Nader Shabahangi and Dr. Leslie Ross of UCSF to develop and test a curriculum that teaches both my experiential view of dementia (which we here call "forgetfulness"), along with mindfulness training for care partners. The goal is to help professional care partners make "in the moment" connections with the people they care for, and we hope to see improved well-being among all as a result.
Nader has been a co-author of two wonderful books, published by Elders Academy Press. The first, Deeper into the Soul (co-authored by Dr. Bogna Zymkiewicz) explores the concept of shifting from "disease" (dementia) to "shifting experience" (forgetfulness) in a graphic book style that revolves around conversations of four characters: A sage, his trainee, a psychologist and a physician. Together they take the reader deep into new territory in how we view people who have been diagnosed with "Alzheimer's" or other types of dementia.
Here are some examples of the insights in this amazing book:
"There is nothing wrong with people who forget what we think is worth remembering. Be curious about what you don't understand. They live in different realities, and thus they have much to teach us."
"No matter how many brain cells disappear, human beings are still spiritual and emotional mysteries searching for their purpose and meaning in life."
"Approach the person with forgetfulness as if you were just about to enter a sacred space. Communication is not only about content. It is also--sometimes most of all--about feelings."
My favorite:
"Old people often use an object like a wedding ring to symbolize something from the past. A person in present time, like yourself, can represent a mother or a sister. When old people combine one thought with another, they are often very poetic."
You can guess why this book resonates with me. It also includes enlightened views of distress and some basic science background as well. The sage also reminds us: "Care is magical: you can feel it in the air when you walk into a caring place.. Everything is caring and cared for: people, furniture, objects, flowers..."
Nader also co-authored Conversations with Ed. Ed Voris is a man who was diagnosed with dementia in Southern California. Nader and Dr. Patrick Fox of UCSF interview Ed about his experiences and share the wisdom he has gained.
Here are some examples:
"Maybe how we should describe elderhood is when we pass beyond the frantic race for life that occurs within the first 50 years."
"When I received the information from my doctor that I had dementia, I was about as low as a snake's neck. But then it's been one generous thing after another."
"I don't think it's misleading to say I'm unquestionably happier and fuller with less."
One powerful story is that shortly after the diagnosis, Ed drove to his local organization, walked in and explained his diagnosis and that he was looking for support. He was told they couldn't talk to him unless he came back with a family member. Wow.
I also got to hear a book discussion by Candacy (Can-DAY-see) Taylor, who wrote the book Counter Culture: The American Coffee Shop Waitress (c.2009 Cornell University Press). A specialist in culture, author and photographer, Taylor waitressed her way through graduate school, so she has lived the life. But for her book, she traveled 26,000 miles around the U.S. and interviewed dozens of career waitresses, all over the age of 50.
The presentation was a combination of slides, audio clips of her interviews, and social commentary. She also brought along Sondra, herself a waitress for 39 years, to share her perspectives. Among Taylor's discoveries: Career waitresses are extremely happy and love what they do. They are carers and gain great satisfaction in forming sustaining relationships with those who come to the diners. Many go outside their jobs to continue their care for their "customers', who are in reality their friends. They also make a better living than most people think.
One waitress mentioned that the work ethic seems to be less in the younger people who come to the job, usually for only a short time. "You can always tell how a new waitress will do by watching how they make toast. If they stand there and watch the bread in the toaster, they're not going to make it."
Candacy has had some offers for a show based on the book. Hopefully they will recognize her great regard for the wisdom of the more experienced women, and not fill the show with 20-somethings. She is also shopping her audio files with shows like This American Life. Ira Glass, take note!!!
Find out more about Candacy at www.taylormadeculture.com.
I may very well leave my heart in San Francisco. It's an amazing place! Here's one last thought from Nader: "By caring for an elder, we also care for that part of ourselves that will grow old."
G. Allen Power MD, FACP
Eden Mentor
Dualism is the dominant belief by which much of our thinking is governed today. This belief categorizes the world, people and their behavior into what is acceptable and unacceptable, into what is right and what is wrong, desirable and undesirable, normal and abnormal, into what is healthy and what is pathological. Similarly, our current thinking about memory loss - a phenomenon the bio-medical approach has labeled dementia with the commonly known 'Alzheimer's disease' being one of its many expressions - adheres to such dualistic thinking. This thinking holds remembering and memory as preferable over forgetting, over having little or no memory. Such a viewpoint pathologizes forgetting as dementia and describes memory-loss as cognitive impairment. However, this viewpoint is just that: a point of view or story. Another story understands forgetting as an important gift that allows for something else to emerge and be present. This story describes an attitude that looks for meaning and purpose behind symptoms and conditions, behind that what appears in front of us. We can name the story that believes in dementia, along with its concomitant symptom descriptions and pictures of brain-scans, the story of a matter-based, meaningless universe. In essence it is the story propagated by the modern scientific method that validates as truth the observable, measurable and replicable aspects of life. The result of such a story is that it only addresses a small window of what we humans call the sum total of reality. That it does so very well should not cover up the fact that such an approach only understands a tiny portion of our world.
The other story of forgetting as a gift, as purposeful, is based on us humans inhabiting a meaningful universe as much governed by matter as by spirit. From this point of view all that occurs and takes place has meaning and purpose, is not accidental and pathological. Forgetting is meaningful and serves a purpose. The German philosopher Nietzsche considered it our greatest gift:
"But in the case of the smallest and the greatest happiness, it is always just one thing alone that makes happiness - happiness: the ability to forget, or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel ahistorically over the entire course of its duration. Anyone who cannot forget the past entirely and set himself down on the threshold of the moment, anyone who cannot stand, without dizziness or fear, on one single point like a victory goddess, will never know what happiness is; worse, he will never do anything that makes others happy." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
This is quite remarkable a statement: forgetting as precondition to happiness. And, yes, if we think about a world where we would have to remember everything, where our wounds, trauma, sufferings, embarrassments were always present with, how could we get up in the morning?
"There is a deeper drive that works in us and through our actions. Earth wants to rise in us, and it is through our life-work that the earth rises invisibly, in the transformed state of human consciousness. This creates a strange in-between state, an inner space that opens up and overflows as excess of being in the midst of human life, even when this life perishes. We are here to "realize" the world, to raise it from a state of simple existence into consciousness, and thereby we open up another dimension. It is as if the earth itself wants this internalization, to become invisible, or to exist in a mental space. The earth wants not just to exist, but to be known and felt for what it is."
Excerpts from Dr. Juergen Braungardt's work.
In speaking of the poetics of aging I would like to remind the reader of the very meaning of the word poesis. With poesis the ancient Greeks referred to the act of making, of creating. To speak of the poetics of aging, then, is to speak – expressed quite literally – of creating aging, of being actively engaged in the aging process. Given the inseparability of life and aging, to speak of the poetics of aging is to speak thus also of the poetics of life.
The poetics of aging views our existence as a creative process of making a life. It is based on the belief that we humans possess an innate desire and will to deepen our understanding of who we are, of our purpose and meaning. It is interesting to note that when we are in our youth the process of aging is synonymous with growing up, with learning, with becoming more aware, more of an adult.
The process of aging is equivalent to the process of changing. We might even go as far as to replace the word “aging” with the word “changing”, a substitution that does not alter the conceptual meaning of aging. The expression “I am changing” captures the same essence as the statement “I am aging”. Yet, the latter contains more often than not a burdened meaning showing the degree to which we have given the word aging a biased, derogatory meaning. This bias begins sometime around middle adulthood – though there are signs in popular culture that such bias is entering even early adulthood.
With our longer lifespans, however, the question emerges: What is the meaning of Old Age? This question, asked so directly by Bill Thomas, MD, is at the heart of the question we must answer these days. More musings to follow on this topic.
A couple of weeks ago, AIA San Francisco wound up its annual “Architecture and the City” festival with a nice jolt of inspiration. In an event at SPUR, organized in conjunction with GOOD Magazine, designers presented solutions to real-world problems. All of the conundrums were interesting and meaty: The California Public Utilities Commission, for example, wants more people to install solar hot water (Civil Twilight’s proposed marketing campaign included bright-yellow outdoor showers for surfers), and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority wants to get more people to take public transportation in bus-phobic Silicon Valley (Brute Labs suggested a new service based on the corporate shuttle model). But the most poignant of all the problems was posed by retirement-home developer AgeSong: “To create a forgetfulness-friendly city and environment where many seniors in the early and more moderate stages of forgetfulness can live safely and happily.”
AgeSong was “matched” with a landscape designer, Sarah Kuehl, of renowned firm Peter Walker & Partners. It proved to be an inspired fit; landscape designers, by dint of their work, are necessarily concerned with how their designs mature and age over time. Kuehl addressed the challenge by seeing it as an opportunity to fix multiple issues at once: 1.) that as a society, we don’t value the aging process (of people, of things, or of plants), 2.) that our elderly are suffering from isolation because traveling by public transportation or by foot can be difficult, and 3.) that a lot of public landscapes are suffering because they don’t get regular maintenance.
So in addition to improving pedestrian connections to the surrounding neighborhood, shops, and services for AgeSong’s retirement properties, Kuehl also proposed something more overarching. She envisions an elite force of “nurturers” that would be highly visible in the community: akin and complementary to the police force, but dedicated to caring rather than protecting and defending. They would be trained in helping the elderly and serving as crossing guards, but also in landscape maintenance.
For this cadre of caretakers, she came up with this logo of an old tree that is being propped up and nurtured rather than chopped down (based on an actual tree in Japan).
According to the US Census Bureau, 1 in 5 of us will be older than 65 in 2030. We may want to make more investments in making the public sphere more elder-friendly–not just in terms of physical accessibility, but in terms of social infrastructure.
What a fun and deep evening it was last night at AgeSong Bayside Park! The Stagebridge Theatre Company (www.stagebridge.org) gave a stunning presentation at our Emeryville community of their musical "Never Too Late". All the fun and music and sharp one-liners were filled with quite clever challenges to our mainstream view of aging as decline and uselessness. Making fun of our aging process, our little and big ailments, our forgetfulness and slowness, served the much deeper understanding of how small those issues are compared to the largeness of our human spirit - a spirit ever more profound with age. AgeSong looks forward to many more creative performances of this kind.
It is time to prepare kids for the new school year again and as I see all the back-to-school sale advertisements, I cannot help but to remember my own school days and all the excitement that came with starting a new school year. What would we learn this year? Whom would we meet new? What field trips would we make? And where would we go? The quest for learning and growing, for understanding and exploring are beautiful attributes we humans possess. At AgeSong we believe that these human qualities can be nourished and deepened irrespective of our stage in life. Actually, as we mature in years our desire for becoming more aware of the meaning of life, for the amazing complexity of our world and humanity, increases. Lifelong learning institutes and schools are opening at an accelerating pace and elders in their eighties and nineties receiving advanced university degrees and/or certificates are not longer an exception.
Besides intellectual learning, however, the urge to grow also finds an expression in being creative with expressive arts. The latter we emphasize especially in our elder communities where daily workshops in all the various expressive arts are the norm. And I can understand why. Is it not true for many of us that as get older that our inner critic who would always tell us that our paintings or music were not good enough has become more gentle and accepting with us? Is it not true that now we care not quite as much about how 'good' our drawings are compared to those of our neighbor?
Dear to my heart is also the learning that the young can glean from our elders when it comes to the many different perspectives and experiences of life. I find it so valuable if the young can learn that taking time to relate and connect with other friends and family is as important as running to the next task on the list. That looking at life from the long perspective, from a life lived, is as rich a viewpoint as what is happening today and tomorrow. And that being is as important as doing, that reaching out to others is as important as taking care of yourself, is as important as getting a good grade and getting ahead.
Yes, it is a beautiful trait that we humans do not want to stand still, want to keep moving both in and outside, desire to understand life more deeply. As a teacher at heart I cannot imagine a more touching moment when I look in the eyes of younger students and see the joy they experience with some discovery, some creation they made. It is the same joy I see in the eyes of an older person when we sit together and I listen attentively to a story they tell. In some way we seem to never stop going back to school – the only change might be that as we get older we do not get as many candies and cookies anymore – and that might just be a wise thing, too.
There is much literature today describing for us the steps necessary to age successfully. These steps mostly, if not exclusively, focus on the body, how to keep it healthy, keep it walking and moving, keep it as much as possible free from medically defined symptoms. And, of course, there is much emphasis on how to avoid the atrophying of our brain, keep if from becoming demented or cognitively impaired. A so-called healthy body is desirable to maintain, of course. However, what is the meaning of a healthy body if it does not serve a purpose, if the human being does not continue to deepen emotionally, does not continue to explore the bigger questions of and in life? Separating body and mind ignores not only the interdependency of all we are but also does not pay heed to the importance of meaning in our lives. The very expression of living an empty life refers to such a condition.
Any definition of successful aging – which equals successful living – must include our quality of life, must include meaning and purpose, an engagement with the world.
There is much literature today describing for us the steps necessary to age successfully. These steps mostly, if not exclusively, focus on the body, how to keep it healthy, keep it walking and moving, keep it as much as possible free from medically defined symptoms. And, of course, there is much emphasis on how to avoid the atrophying of our brain, keep if from becoming demented or cognitively impaired. A so-called healthy body is desirable to maintain, of course. However, what is the meaning of a healthy body if it does not serve a purpose, if the human being does not continue to deepen emotionally, does not continue to explore the bigger questions of and in life? Separating body and mind ignores not only the interdependency of all we are but also does not pay heed to the importance of meaning in our lives. The very expression of living an empty life refers to such a condition.
Any definition of successful aging – which equals successful living – must include our quality of life, must include meaning and purpose, an engagement with the world.
A core tenet of humanistic psychology and philosophy is the belief that human life is intrinsically significant. This meaningfulness extends to all we do and are in life. It is evident in our creative expressions, in our work, in the choices we make, in the way we keep writing and rewriting our life stories. It is also evident in the way we age, that we age. Though this seems an obvious insight to many, we need to remember only the intense cultural opposition to aging that shows itself not only in promotion of anti-, and “successful aging” campaigns but, perhaps most poignantly, in the publications by more and more members of the scientific establishment. Those writings, in the name of modern science, tend to bio-medicalize aging i.e. look at aging from a standpoint of biology only. Such a limited viewpoint can create the impression that aging is a disease ignoring the many other dimensions of human development and growth associated with growing older. This is not the place to cite the innumerous literature attesting to this conception and movement. Rather, I would like to point out the fact that not only popular culture but, increasingly also, members of our own and of other research and professional communities are proposing that aging, phrased succinctly, is something to be overcome, can be cured or fixed.
Of course, this perspective raises a host of questions that have us enter into quite sensitive and risky territory: at what point or age, do we start treating and curing aging? What do we do with those who do not respond to treatment? What about those who do not want treatment? How do we know when treatment is successful? What measures do we use: those of biology, psychology, anthropology?
From a humanistic, poetic point of view, life and aging have meaning. The very processes of life and aging cannot be separated. Without aging there is no life, without life there is no aging. As absurd as this sounds, to propose anti-aging is to propose anti-life, to believe that aging is a disease is to state that life is a disease.
Alison Shapiro in her 'Psychology Today' blog (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/healing-possibility/201002/illusions-independence) reminds us how independence is really a myth, an illusion. For, in fact, we are at all times deeply interdependent as beings. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area we all know, for example, that one simple tremor can shake-up our existence - literally - in a few moments. We especially notice how dependent we are when we fall ill, hurt ourselves, feel sad and sense the need to reach out to another. The economic crisis within which we find ourselves today is yet another reminder of how quickly our ordered world can be turned upside down by other forces.
The illusion of independence can create much pain when we get older and we need to reach out for help. For we equate such reaching out for help as a sign of weakness rather than as evidence that we are simply human. As a matter of fact, Alison makes this very amazing observation. She writes:
"I began to realize that not asking for help is, in fact, selfish. I love to help people. I do it all the time. If I don't let them help me back, I am not allowing them the same satisfaction I enjoy. You could even say that I am, in a way, disempowering them. "Proving" that their help doesn't matter. They want to help me. I don't do them any favors with my fierce independence. Learning this lesson has allowed me once and for all to see and acknowledge with my mind, my heart and my body that my life really is a part of a larger whole."
Wise words, indeed!
On the first day of March I think about the German song that children would sing in elementary school: In March the farmer begins to tend to the land and gets his horses ready to plow them... And I think of my grandfather, that German farmer, who taught me about the land, taught me to treat it kindly and with respect as it not only fed us every year but also was so beautiful to behold. The time my grandparents spent with me teaching me how to see the world through their eyes remains some of the most precious of experiences in my life. I am happy that my mother, herself a grandma, now continues the teaching with her grandchildren, noticing how she takes those long and slow walks in the park with them while their parents are both working and making ends meet. This I find invaluable an education: the slow pace and patience of our elders that can linger so much in the moment, content to be here without any longing to be somewhere else - a deep teaching in our speedy times.
Yes, now that the rain season is slowly coming to an end, it is time to tend to the land again - slowly and with patience.
We had a spirited dialogue yesterday afternoon at AgeSong at Bayside Park, Emeryville, about how we are to tackle our aging process and getting older as people and society. Especially noteworthy was our understanding of the bio-medicalization of aging, a point-of-view that looks at us humans mainly through the lens of a declining body. Such a viewpoint emphasizes, as one audience member remarked, a deficit model of the human being. In other words, we see mostly what is wrong with us rather than what we are continually changing into, what is good about us maturing and about us growing older. Another point was that as we grow older we might have to take on different roles and/or tasks which give us meaning and purpose - beyond being a grandma and/or grandpa for our grandchildren. It was also discussed that assisted-living places can provide for communal living in order to move away from the isolation and loneliness many of our elders feel.
In general, to speak of conscious aging is to speak of conscious living for as we live we age, as we age we live. 'The unreflected life is not worth living' more than one philosopher has pointed out throughout our human history. The continual questioning of what are we here for, what is our purpose and meaning, what are we called to do during our sejourn here on this planet provides a starting point for such reflection. Answers to these big questions will evolve and change and often lead to more questions - an insight that led the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke to implore us to 'learn to live in the question' - not an easy position to take in a world so driven to find answers.
"Anyone who cannot forget the past entirely and set himself down on the threshold of the moment, anyone who cannot stand, without dizziness or fear, on one single point like a victory goddess, will never know what happiness is; worse he will never do anything that makes others happy."
- Fredrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations
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