JULY 2, TUESDAY

AGEISM

The topic these days is Biden’s age, or Biden showing signs of his age. There are two aspects of this if you are over 80 yourself. The first is whether Biden is up to the demands of the presidency, whether he can with the help of advisors make the right choices, whether, for a voter, he can stand up for your values.

The second aspect is whether the signs of aging will turn voters off and he will lose the election because of that, regardless of how capable he is. You can, I can, feel that he is quite capable of making the right choices with the help of his advisors (advisors are equally important if the President is 60 or 50) but at the same time sense that his appearing to be old will turn off voters, mainly younger voters, and therefore he will lose the election.

But this choice is an attitude dependent on ageism, the attitude toward old age by voters. Some people feel that a person who is 30 is too young to be president, that a woman is not capable of being a good president, that a Catholic will be ruled by the Pope, that a black person cannot or should not win, that a gay person will be rejected by voters, that a disabled person (Roosevelt hid his disability) is not capable of being President. All of these are forms of prejudice. So it could be that rejection of people who appear to be old is ageism, simply prejudice.

I have noticed that more and more, as I get older and approach 90, that people pigeonhole me as an old man and pay no attention to me. But partly the reverse is also true. Everyone else to me seems younger and younger, doctors who are 30 seem to be just kids and hardly capable, where when I was 40 they would have seemed fully adult and trustworthy. As I get older the concerns of young people and their activities and enthusiasms seem less and less interesting. I am left out of the conversation partly because I am not interested in the conversation. Other things are more interesting to me. These posts that I write probably show this. As I approach 90 I am less and less interested in politics or the latest trends or what wine is best and more and more interested in wondering why I am here on earth at all and wondering what my experience teaches me about life. I don’t want to exit life before knowing what it is all about and am afraid this might happen.

As I approach 90 I realize that I can’t take anything with me. My possessions, the things I and Kathe collected to make our house a beautiful nest, seem less and less significant, particularly with Kathe not here, and more and more of a burden that my children don’t want to sort through when I die. My flea market addiction at 60 now seems nuts when I have to get rid of the same things.

But this same process of aging can be freeing. Suddenly, without responsibilities, all the social and work and identity issues that used to consume me when I was working and entwined in family life, have dropped away, without my willing or wanting then to go away, and I suddenly find I am free to travel anywhere that I get a whim to go and that without constantly fixating on the future I am able to let go and really enjoy the present. That is what retirement means, letting go. It isn‘t just that you are too old to work productively, but that you can leave productive work to someone else and focus on what makes you feel most alive. Even Biden, if he could let go, might find letting go to be freeing.

In traditional India the fourth stage, the four Astanas, of a man‘s life is letting go of family and work and possessions and retiring to the forest to meditate. I feel as if, without knowing it was coming or choosing it, this is what has happened to me. In the last ten months I have spent a month apiece in Uruguay, Sicily, Greece, Sri Lanka, India and Germany with people that I enjoyed being with and most of the time I have been stimulated and have felt very alive. I am off to Bogata for a month in a couple of months and plan to spend as long as I am welcome in Brindisi, Italy, later in the year and am open to whatever else opens up for me. The golden years have turned out to be just that, golden.

Of course, at any moment my knees may give way or my mind will cease working or cancer will strike. I know this because it is happening to friends my age all around me. That is all the more reason to let go and enjoy the present fully while I can. It certainly separates me from the self I was 30 years ago or from other people who are much younger than me. It may be part of the reason that as an old man I am left out of conversations, or put another way, why at 87 many conversations have stopped interesting me. But right now, I am having fun. My advice to Biden is to let go of the weight of being important and enjoy himself while he can.