When I reached my 85th birthday last Fall Sylvia notified me that I was now officially “Old Old.” It was a little like feeling the difference between “aged” and “ag-ed.” More recently I have been struck by the difference between “aging” and what I have come to call “olding.” Aging, it seems to me, is the physical process of bodily deterioration, whether in the subtle loss of dexterity and difficulty with names, or the more dramatic breaking of bones in a fall. It is something that can be measured by body scans and stress tests. It’s the kind of things the medical industry can track. They are making billions off our aging. It is the thing that people inevitably do.
But “olding” is a more interior process that is both psychological and cultural. It involves the way we plot out a day to take account of inevitable fatigue or reassess how much gardening we can do this week. Beyond that, it is a matter of our self-understanding. How much will we fret about the incompetence of people with less experience and historical awareness than is ours? What interventions will we make in the activities around us? What meetings will we attend and when will we speak up? What entertainments will we plunge into that befit our age? How much pickleball can we manage in a week? Or should we be bird watching beside a lake?
All of these self-assessments are also shaped by the cultural scripts we have embraced about the appropriate behavior of those with white, or very little, hair. How do we speak to those who are twenty, thirty, even fifty years younger than ourselves? How do we present ourselves to much younger people? Even more poignantly, how do we find ways to share with them the history and judicious observations that have come to guide us in our accumulating years?
Olding first of all involves the process of acting appropriately into the dramatic templates for life’s last years which our culture provides to us. Are we the old man battling the sea till that last storm? Do we withdraw, even if only in our minds, into the forest of natural delights? Do we find a community center buzzing with little children and sit down to say a few words with a little child or perhaps read a few pages from Jack and the Beanstalk? Do we sit quietly meditating in church and on the porch if we are lucky enough to have one, letting memories do the work of hot anticipation?
Olding presents the task of fitting ourselves out in new roles and habits. It is a process of getting off the automatic escalator of cultural expectations and letting go of the desire to fit in or be useful. It is claiming the freedom to say No as well as Yes. It is the liberation from ill-fitting habits of compliance and conventionality. While the culture sees this as the preparation for dying, from the inside it feels more like the letting go that Jesus said was the doorway to life abundant. But with it comes the cold wind of fear, of loss, of isolation. Our life-long friends, even our spouses, fade into incomprehensibility or death. A mystery opens up before us, not as a void but as an embrace more universal than the stages of human life behind us. It is a time to find what it is not simply to be aged, but to be old. To be old like a sequoia. And in that, to live by faith and a primordial trust in life even more than we ever imagined in the stages that defined us in our early years.
Great thoughts! I am 20 years your junior, but can already relate to some of this. I had lunch with my team today, and I was telling a 20 year old about getting a certain album (that I still listen to) for my birthday when I was 14, and his response was “a record?!?”. Ha! To him I am as old as the pyramids and the record might as well be made of papyrus. Even funnier, another 20 year old chastised him for pointing out my age, as if I care, which as you note, is one of the better aspects of aging and olding (not caring what others think). So, it is all relative, and you are a kid to someone that has reached 105, who no doubt wishes they could still turn wood in the shop. Long live The Professor!
Thank you for your reflections on aging and olding ! I turned 85 three weeks before you as you know. But I should have long ago started doing such reflections since my life is not what it used to be since I turned about 82. Because at that time Parkinson was diagnosed with me. Before that I just had an operation at 79 on a benign growth at the prostrate gland without any complications. Parkinson was without any visible signs of trembling in my legs, but my handwriting had become quite difficult to read and I walked with a visibly more bent back. Just about a year ago I felt the first trembing and difficulties in walking without hesitation. That problem was no blow to my feeling of life yet, but when in the course of the last 12 months my problems of movement increased.
Now I feel happy when I can walk without problems, but feel incapacitated when I cannot move and have to inch forward with great hesitation – in spite of increases in my medication with dopamin pills.
Now I feel that I am not only aging, but definitely olding. And it took off my living as if there were no end approaching. My family (I still have a 20 year old and a 14 year old daughter) have told me for quuite a number of years that I should write my memoirs (for them) and put order into my affairs. This has given me a sense of more urgency in life than I have had for many years and has increased my reading and open listening to the Biblical message on earthly life and feeling its urgency of the perspective of eternal life. My bodily weakness increases my spiritual openness. A healthy change!
Thanks, Bill, for this insight. For the past few years I have been focused on my ‘aging’ self, working with a fitness trainer and paying more attention to nutrition. I have found, to my surprise, that this has given me not only more energy, but eagerness and clarity to focus on my ‘olding’ as well. I am much more ‘carpe diem’ and much more aware of my daily experiences. It’s a joyful way to live.
Thanks Bill, for this wise, thoughtful and honest reflection on the gifts and challenges that are found in “olding.” You and Sylvia continue to offer, in my mind, a model of gracious “olding.”
Joyce H
Thank you, Bill, for this thoughtful description of my reality at age 85. Here is my daily commitment which I review each morning: “I choose to live this season attentive, grateful, compassionate, and truthful. I acknowledge and honor my limitations without letting them shrink my soul. I seek to live in a way that brings peace rather than turmoil, depth rather than accumulation, and love rather than control and exclusion.”
Bill, I am not so sure I agree totally with your more than cynical? thoughts on olding. I find the more I keep involved with learning (taking classes), the better my olding is. I am changing my whole job emphasis which is very intriguing to me. I think it will keep me active much longer than if I were not taking online classes. Jayne