Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aging. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

To live, perchance to grow down

I have settled on "growing down" as a description of the next 30 years of my life ("if, if, if, cry the green bells of Cardiff").

A childhood of sorts is coming on, a slow losing of touch with reality as my hearing deteriorates (the world is too noisy, anyway). How long before my eyesight goes, my sense of smell, my ability to feel? I'm not worried about Alzheimer's, if I get it that won't be my problem; I will be in some other planet. I do hope I can avoid pain.

There's also a dawning realization of what wasn't and won't be. I didn't grow up to be President of the United States like John F. Kennedy nor win the Nobel Peace Prize like Albert Schweitzer. I wasn't a particularly well-liked individual (although I was a profficient seducer, one on one). I took care of myself and mine, passably well in material terms, but I don't think that outside my household anyone's life is better because I existed. 

My generation was going to bring peace and love and and sharing ... and here we are ... fighting "terrorism," watching African-Americans unjustifiably killed by police with impunity, watching how even in the richest countries the poor swallow up the middle class into their pits of misery while a banal meaningless few live in Luxuristan.

Growing down is a kind of solution. Perhaps there is reincarnation. Perhaps I was even worse in a past life and in the next I'll carry the lessons of accomplishing nothing in this one.

Eventually it will be all over. A thousand years from now, or one hundred thousand perhaps, an archeologist will pick up a bone fragment from my skull and exclaim, "ah, a primitive from the turn of the 21st century."

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Life should close like a good novel

Now I see why the wise are usually portrayed as also old.  All of a sudden, the grand sweep of life begins to make sense, what I sensed correctly and what I missed by a mile. I just had to reach the dénouement of various strands in my story.

Today is the 32nd anniversary of my father's death and, unlike my father who just missed his 60th birthday as he did meeting his first grandchild, I passed both markers toward the fullness of life.

In past weeks, out of nowhere I have been happening upon realizations, some trite, some obvious, but all humbling and reorienting. I am reminded of the process Carl Gustav Jung thought occurred at this stage of life: he called it "integration."

I see integration as a phenomenon in which the parts of us that compartmentalized themselves for often practical reasons (the parent, the employee, the friend, the lover, etc.) now come together to deepen our philosophical understanding and weave a whole Weltaanschauung (I love using this word! Look it up!).

How foolish and arrogant I was! How much effort wasted on foolhardy enterprises! How humbling it is to realize that I am no better, and probably no worse, than any other human being, especially those I have criticized without mercy!

The beginning of wisdom, I suppose, is to realize how little one really knows. Thank you, Socrates.