The Gifts of Age: Part 1

I asked Dan Oestre­ich and Deb Call to join with me (I’m Dick Richards) in cre­at­ing a post about “the gifts of age” because it seemed that we were each plow­ing that field in our indi­vid­ual blogs. So this is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort and it has been my priv­i­lege to put our thoughts togeth­er and to act as nar­ra­tor for this two-part adven­ture. These two posts are being pub­lished simul­ta­ne­ous­ly at our blogs.

In response to my invi­ta­tion, Deb wrote of a less­en­ing of judg­men­tal atti­tudes as one gift of age. “Smack in middle-age,” she wrote, “I find that life has soft­ened my edges. With per­spec­tive I rely less on black and white think­ing. Being judg­men­tal feels less sat­is­fy­ing. I haven’t extin­guished these traits, as my hus­band will attest, but engage in them less frequently.”

She also rec­og­nizes anoth­er gift of age, which she calls inner con­fi­dence. “I dis­tin­guish this inner con­fi­dence as a will­ing­ness to be my “real self,” she wrote. “It dif­fers from the exter­nal, ego dri­ven con­fi­dence I devel­oped from accom­plish­ments as a way to prove some­thing to oth­ers. Inner con­fi­dence means I no longer have to look a decade younger if I don’t want to. Inner con­fi­dence means I can cel­e­brate mid­dle age my way, even if my friends and hus­band don’t get it yet. It’s about my rec­og­niz­ing whose sto­ry I’m lis­ten­ing to about how to do ‘middle age’.”

As an exam­ple about lis­ten­ing to her own sto­ry rather than some­one else’s, Deb wrote, “The oth­er day I stopped into my eye doctor’s office to pick up an order of con­tact lens­es. I hap­pened to glance down and see a woman’s mag­a­zine. Sal­ly Field sat on the cov­er. The head­line read ‘How to Look Sev­en Years Younger.’ I had my Eure­ka moment: this is an old sto­ry foist­ed upon Amer­i­can women about how to age. Who cares? Obvi­ous­ly I don’t any­more. The real gift of age is the one I give myself, the inner con­fi­dence that says I don’t need anyone’s per­mis­sion any­more to be the nat­ur­al me!”

Dan told a sto­ry which led him to yet anoth­er gift of age. He wrote, “Fifteen years ago I embarked on a major mid-life learn­ing and change process. I thought at the begin­ning I was refin­ing the work I did for pay. It did that in a major way, and it over­turned every­thing in my per­son­al life as well. Fig­u­ra­tive­ly, I went down into the pit, the well of grief, I believe the poet David Whyte calls it, to find the gold­en coins. It was a very tough peri­od emo­tion­al­ly, enor­mous highs and lows. I lost many rela­tion­ships. I was often–usually–at war with myself over some­thing. The one coin I seemed to have brought back I would call accep­tance.”

Dan’s sto­ry remind­ed me of a friend in his late eight­ies who told me that he was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing names. I asked him how he felt about that, expect­ing to hear a tale of frus­tra­tion and loss. He replied, “Oh, I’ve accept­ed it. Right now I have one prob­lem; I can’t remem­ber names. If I don’t accept it then I’ll have two problems.”

Non-judg­men­tal­ism, inner con­fi­dence, accep­tance. And I will add one more gift of age, fruition.

Fruition means, the con­di­tion of bear­ing fruit. Seeds plant­ed in my mind have some­times tak­en years to bear any­thing but ane­mic fruit. For exam­ple, six­teen years ago I had a sud­den flash of insight: “I don’t have to prove any­thing to anybody.” But an insight is not a change, and for many years there­after I con­tin­ued on the path of prov­ing var­i­ous things about myself to var­i­ous peo­ple. Today, while I still work at extin­guish­ing the urge-to-prove, I final­ly feel con­fi­dent that I no longer desire to prove any­thing even when old impuls­es to do so arise. This fruit is now robust, but it has tak­en six­teen years to ful­ly under­stand, inte­grate, and prac­tice not-prov­ing. Those years came only by aging.

The kind of fruit we get depends, of course, on the seeds we choose to nour­ish. I like the fol­low­ing sto­ry to illus­trate the point. Two elder­ly Jew­ish men, who had met in and sur­vived a Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camp, came togeth­er again many years lat­er. The first man asked the sec­ond how life had been since their lib­er­a­tion from the camp. The sec­ond man told of a life of con­tent­ment and accom­plish­ment, said, “I’ve for­giv­en them for what they did,” and then asked the first man about his life. The first man told of a life of resent­ment and woe and said, “I’ll nev­er for­give those bas­tards.” The sec­ond man shook his head sad­ly, “That is all too bad,” he said, “It seems they still have you in their prison.”

The seeds we choose to nour­ish, and their effect on the gifts of age, will be the sub­ject of Part 2 in this series. 

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