First a small complaint. I use the phrase "getting old" in the label for this post. The more recent usage as been "getting older." Or, sometimes, "aging." Aging is what happens to the patients in the neonatal ward just as much as in the Alzheimer's ward. Ditto for getting older. Getting old, on the other hand, is reserved for the veterans of many campaigns, during some of which we acquired wounds. It's not a word I want to give away. I also don't want to use it apologetically or to avoid it.
I've puzzled for some years how many of the increasing debilities of old age make me feel savvy and competent. It doesn't seem that they should. I began thinking about this in the 1970s when I noticed that my head got cold in cold weather if I didn't wear something on it. As I experienced it, this is a sequence of three steps. One, I am young and hotblooded and my head doesn't get cold when I expose it to cold weather. Or I don't care that much. Two, I don't cover my head in cold weather and I get cold and something bad happens to me. Three, I know I am going out into cold weather so I am careful to wear something--usually a ballcap--and nothing bad happens. It might happen to other old guys who don't have the understanding and foresight I do, but it doesn't happen to me.
It's that sequence of steps that caught my eye. If we went directly from one to three, it would probably feel like a loss. But moving from two to three feels like I figured something out and now I'm making it work. It's not that my head is vulnerable; it's that I'm so smart about adapting to it. It's all sleight of mind, really.
Nearly all the physical ailments I have acquired--these are like the campaign ribbons I alluded to above--follow this pattern. I'd rather not have them (stage one compared to stage two) but I have mastered some aspect of the effects (stage two compared to stage three). And so on through a list of ailments any old man (I speak from my own experience) can produce and that will make nearly any younger man (I speak from my own experience) roll his eyes and wait for the deep mine of complaints finally to peter out.
So as I acquire new debilities, I acquire new knowledge of how to manage them better than I did when they were new. The constraints surrounding the way I live my life increase, but I don't notice the constraints as much as I notice the high quality adaptation to them. It's amazing.
On the other hand, think of it this way. If you had a new car, you would get in and turn it on and drive away. It's effective but it's largely unconscious. But if you had an old car, a car you had owned for a long time and which you knew well, it wouldn't look like that. You would get in (kicking the door once, at the front edge, usually frees up the latch in the door); you would turn it on (crank it twice, then hold the accelerator pedal down for about five seconds, then crank it the final time); and drive away (the elastic band which you have passed through the steering wheel and attached to the lever below the driver's seat will keep the car from drifting persistently to the left).
Now see there? You really aren't unconscious about the old car. You can't afford to be. Each liability is something you have learned to overcome, something you take pleasure in overcoming. Getting in this car and driving it away is an exercise in sophistication and mastery. What's not to like about that?
All this came back to me in the last few days as I remembered an old Arnie Palmer Pennzoil ad. Arnie had been an old golfer for quite a while by the time of this ad. He still had Arnie's Army around him and was a very popular athlete. The ad showed him tooling around the golf course he designed in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, sitting in a very old tractor. He explained that the tractor still worked so well because he had always taken care of it with Pennzoil. He closed with a rueful laugh, and the line. "...and I believe in taking care of the old equipment."
I thought it was funny because he was the "old equipment" he was actually referring to and everyone knew it. The fact that there was a tractor in the picture made misunderstanding possible and therefore made understanding more fun.
Youth is wasted on the young, but it occurred to me that aging is really scary. My big problems as a boy were really small in context to death or debilitating disease or just gradual loss of what you could always count on. Seriously scary. Never when younger could you have hoped to articulate a coping strategy. I have looked at my aging with suspicion, realizing well after things gone that I haven’t defined myself that way in any number of years. I haven’t jumped with any reason to suspect I would get any air in 2 decades…not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t do that anymore. Only recently did it occur to me that I couldn’t. At 47 it is getting closer to home. Things I sometimes want to do…like out-wrestle Doug, might be behind me. But I can think about such things over a glass of wine I couldn’t afford when younger, so I guess things are better after all.
ReplyDeleteHi folks. My name is Bonnie Klein. I’m a former student of Dale’s (Westminster, ’78!) and contacted him a few years ago when, after a career of teaching h.s. English, I began teaching IB Theory of Knowledge. We discovered we share a crucial interest in similar topics and a structural/analytical bent in our approach to them, and we began a friendship, engaging in conversations about pedagogy, behavioral psychology, marriage, Christianity, and a range of human issues. So I’m an old student and a young friend.
ReplyDeleteYoung and old.
When I was young—high school age—I totally got the phrase you used, Dan, to open your comment. Youth is wasted on the young, I felt, because the young don’t have the freedom, means, or legal ability for the most part, to act on their own behalf while they are young enough to risk doing the things they want. (Probably don’t have the sense either—undeveloped pre-frontal cortices, and all.) Instead, the way I was taught, you must learn and work for most of your life to gain the ability and credibility to make choices for yourself. With a focus on ability and credibility, I came to value all the lessons of my youth, rather than think them wasted, a shift I’ll come back to in a minute.
I have relished every one of my birthdays as each year honed my talents and each experience gave me a broader base from which to make decisions. But I’ve noticed lately that the metrics I use to evaluate many things have changed. I'll turn 52* in a few days and this will be the first birthday that doesn’t seem to mean much to me. The developing-ability-and-earning-credibility scale is diminishing in importance as I prepare to leave my career and consider significant changes in my life situation. If I’m no longer trying to jockey myself into a professional or social position, the value of the birthday marker fades. I want, now, to focus more on personal relationships and that brings up a whole other set of scales by which to measure myself. Traits that I never thought of as assets or liabilities (constraints) now attract my attention.
Dale, I wonder if “getting old,” increasing the regularity with which you “acquire new debilities,” moved your focus from your ability to manage vulnerabilities to the fact of your having them, and in doing so revealed this tendency to cover over the constraining nature of debilities with your pleasure at managing them.
It’s a cool discovery. When I learned how to manage a room full of tenth graders, I felt proud of my accomplishment; I didn’t really think of myself as deficient to start with, only that I “had to learn how to do this” because the job required it. It was a suppression of the consciousness of my original state in favor of the self-congratulation I felt at having improved it.
This tendency seems forward-thinking, positive and uplifting. It focuses on what we can make of ourselves and it affirms our triumphs. But it’s also a denial of sorts, or at least a sweeping-under-the-rug, of what our actual vulnerabilities are. It is, indeed, amazing that we don’t see our vulnerabilities as constraints when we have learned how to manage them, because they still exist—we haven’t eliminated a weak knee just because we’ve learned how to walk without feeling the pain from it. That we engage in this cover-up “naturally” sounds like self(psyche)-preservation to me.
All of these shifts—in the perception of our physical states, in the standards by which we distinguish big problems from little ones, in the values we subscribe to as our life-circumstances change—are, though certainly disconcerting at times, thoroughly amazing to me. Life is the greatest adventure, isn’t it!
*”Turn 52” is an odd phrase, isn’t it? Am I leaving behind the person who was 51, turning a corner, or turning into something else? Though the change is subtle, hardly one that pivots on a single day, I suppose it’s true. I am physically and psychologically a different being than I was a year ago. The same man never steps in the same river twice. But he does bring along more baggage the second time.
It looks to me as if Dan and Bonnie are headed in different directions. Let me try Dan's first. I like your distinction between "what I don't do" and "what I can't do." The former needs to be re-examined from time to time. Maybe now you can do it again. I learned that in the middle of a Hood To Coast run that I began by race walking.
ReplyDeleteThe latter, as you pointed out, isn't going to change. If you can't, you can't. For me, there would be a developmental detour at that point. Maybe for you, too. I can't to THIS (Form A), but I can now do THIS (Form B). A and B might be really equivalent as you experience them and the only reason to prefer A is that it is the one you are more familiar with. Maybe.
For me, the conscious shift from A to B feels good. Doesn't it feel good to you? Like managing my quirky old car in the paragraph I added to the post and which might not have been part of the edition you saw. That's the "smart" part of "old and smart."
And the wine? To me, the real accomplishment is not so much that you can now afford really good wine; it is that you know how to tell what is good about it. You can't buy a palate.
I want to see if I can catch Bonnie's drift this time. I'm trying to remember when 52 seemed old to me. That was 1989, not too long from the time Bonnie and I faced each other in class.
ReplyDeleteBonnie, I think you hit all the big time categories in the next to last paragraph. There we find a) the perceptions, b) the standards (big and little) and c) the values we hold throughout. That's a powerful little paragraph.
The sense of being able to handle a classroom full of egos and hormones is pretty satisfying, I agree. But it doesn't have that three step device I was counting on--don't have to, do have to but don't, and do have to but do. If you relied on just winging it in class, then came to grief in winging it, then discovered lesson planning (not your sequence, I know) that would have all three elements.
On sweeping the debilities under the rug, I'd have to say I'm against it. I need to know what the debilities are. But I don't need to attend to them as critical IF I can attend to managing them as critical. For me, it's a frontstage, backstage distinction.
The physical trajectory is down. That's what our bodies do. But the other trajectory--emotional?, strategic?, spiritual? intentional?--doesn't have to be down. That's how it seems to me right now, at any rate.
Just one more comment on sweeping the debilities under the rug.
ReplyDeleteI hadn’t meant that you, or any of us, sweep our vulnerabilities or debilities out of sight on purpose. I think we do it as a matter of course, either because we’re distracted by life’s hustle and bustle or because we’d rather not look at them. We’d rather look at our successes in dealing with them. So I think we do the “sweeping under the rug” without really knowing we’re doing it.
You’re against that and would rather know the debilities you’re up against? Well, yeah. Your Causal Attribution Journal similarly aims at helping one discover, name, and place problems that limit his “life space.” We’re not always clear about what limits us, and collecting raw data about our lives and seeing what turns up can be very revealing.
Controlling your attention so that you don’t lose sight of your debilities sounds like similar data collection. The debilities may not occupy the foreground of your thinking, but they’re there for you in the background. I just don’t think we’re all that attentive. You REALIZE you “don’t notice the constraints as much as…the high quality adaptation to them.” The old car analogy notwithstanding, that’s pretty attentive.