I have been thinking about the process of growing older for a long
time. In my 30s, I discovered I had all sorts of stereotypes about old
people (which for me at that age was anyone over 60) and that most of
my notions were just plain wrong. For example, I learned though
conversations with a number of older friends that most people aren’t
afraid to die after a certain point—but they are afraid to die without having left a mark or without having been able to pass on their life’s experience to the younger generation.
I began to distinguish that we all grow old ‘into a cultural
interpretation’ of what it means to grow older, into a story about what
we can expect and what is and isn’t possible. I realized that aging
isn’t personal, anymore than the weather is (or any other context we
all share for that matter). Yet, our whole conversation about aging
seems to be about ‘me’ and what I want, how I feel, why I am doing or
not doing something, and what I think about everything and everyone in
my life.

For
the last couple of years, my intellectual interest in aging as a topic
has begun to morph into a mission of sorts—a campaign to transform the
cultural of aging from one of decline to one of possibility. I want to
look forward to the future, to growing older and to being as passionate
about life in my last years as I was in my first years.

In a meeting today, someone introduced the topic of life-long
learning by quoting Bill W., the founder of AA. As he’d gotten older,
Bill had realized that, at the end of the day, he wasn’t able to do
what he used to be able to do and that he was simply a symbol of the
organization he’d created. He acknowledged that he had become a student
again in a movement in which he’d thought he was the teacher. The
ensuing discussion underscored the importance of ‘oldtimers’ (people
with many years of sobriety in AA, and just older people in general)
needing to always remember that it is their curiosity and openness to learning that
keeps them growing both mentally and spiritually. Moreover, when we
operate from a perspective of ‘we know’ or ‘been there, done that’ or
any other similarly judgmental frame of reference, we actually are
engaging in a kind of subtle denial and resistance to whatever it is we
are talking about.

I was surprised, shocked and a little embarrassed to see how much of
my day-to-day conversations and thinking was purely judgmental about
the world: discrimination in the workplace, corporate greed,
environmental degradation, public apathy, corruption, technology
depersonalizing human beings, child labor, gangs and the breakdown of
social order, ideological polarization, even the loss of security and
opportunity at the threat of terrorism and the rise of nationalism that
it has unleashed. The list could go on, but my point is that I was
relating to many aspects of my world judgmentally and in negative terms
even though I did not and do not think of myself as particularly
negative. In most cases, I even have some sort of positive proposal or
idea or activity that I am committed to either promoting or
participating in.

What I saw, however, is that I am not relating to these things with
any sense of profound curiosity—I cannot say I have demonstrated a
desire to really want to know what is going on. Yet without a real and
sincere curiosity about what is happening, why it is happening and what
possibilities and the issues it raises, how can there be any authentic
learning? Without curiosity, how can we do anything other than continue
to justify our judgments and resist whatever we are perceiving either
overtly as activists or covertly through some form of denial and/or
resignation?

The implications for my life are immediate and severe. I must stop
trying to ‘fix’ the world by focusing on the culture or aging as ‘the
problem’ (or objectify any other topic as a problem) and refocus my
attention on observing and learning without preconditions or
expectations of understanding. I need to learn newly to “live in the
question” and, as Rilke told the young poet, trust that someday I might
live my way into the answers. What this suggests of course is that most
of what I have to say about almost everything needs to be at best given
and taken with a grain of salt. I don’t think I will retire from the
podium, but I think I will shift from attempting to motivate and
inspire older people to take on a mantle of leadership and change and
suggest that a first step to making the kinds of contributions that we
have to make will require that we recover our curiosity. Without this,
I suspect we will look ‘set in our ways’. Even with the best of
intentions, we will be marginalized and ignored as folks who don’t
listen and are too busy teaching to truly learn about the world as it
is today, unable to then engage with others of all ages to invent
better tomorrows.