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philosophy
Climbing the Mountain of My Emerging Life
Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on.
Dec 29, 2024
Dig, ponder, dig some more.
A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up—not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m... oh yeah, 78. Can you believe it? Another year is almost over. Holiday season shimmers, the smell of pine is in the air. It’s Christmas: a perfect time to open, once again, the stocking known as memory.
In last year’s column, I wrote about three childhood moments that created me as a person—or informed me that I had changed, moved forward in the process of becoming. These were moments of self-awareness. Gosh! I had no idea such a thing existed, but there I was at age six, playing “Red Rover” on my elementary-school playground with a bunch of other kids and I realized: I was part of something bigger than myself; I wasn’t alone. Run and play, laugh and love! It’s called “community” (I later learned).
The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present.
A second moment of becoming: I was 10 and had gotten into a fight after school—with a good pal. Huh? I rode my bike home, parked in the alley behind my house, and stood there rubbing my bruised elbow, aswirl in confusion. Fighting is so stupid! I decided I would never fight again—or rather, knew I would never fight again. I knew I had changed.
The third moment I wrote about was when I was 13. I had just seen a strange, disturbing movie with my mother and sister called Imitation of Life. We had car trouble on the way home and as we waited for the repair work to be finished, a puzzling awareness hit me, totally out of the blue. “I’m a genius,” I told myself—not with a smirk that I’m smarter than you are, but just the opposite. I was overwhelmed. Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on. We’re all creating the future, moment by moment, whether we know it or not.
Yikes. This was far more responsibility than I was comfortable with, but I was stuck with it. I pushed on with growing up. These were all private moments, quietly “me” in a way that was no one else’s business. But some inner balloon (pardon the childish metaphor) was getting ready to burst. I had lousy penmanship, but I was turning into a writer, even though I hardly knew it. In fact, I got a “D” in English in eighth grade because I just couldn’t grasp the rules of grammar that were dumped on us out of the bag of marbles called education. What the heck is a participle? What’s an indirect object?
Attention, grade fanatics: We all learn at our own speed and in our own way. Two years later, in 10th grade, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank. Birth of a writer! Well, sort of. I was riveted by her words, by the details of her life she bequeathed the world—and I felt a deep compulsion to start my own journal.
It literally took a year of trying. I’d buy a 39-cent notebook and start putting pieces of my life into words, usually prefaced with the warning: “Private. Do not read!” I felt compelled to pump up the importance of what I was saying, to write from the perspective that my life was significant. And the journal would never last more than a day or two. I could feel the phoniness in my words and would stash the notebook on a shelf, to be forgotten. But I kept trying! Something in me was determined to make this process work—solely for myself, of course. Turns out that may be the hardest audience of all to win over.
And then—I’m 16 at this point, in 11th grade—something happened: I was certain, I was terrified, that I had failed a solid geometry test one day. When I got home, I opened a notebook and scribbled the words: “God, I am worried. Scared to death is more like it.”
And the words simply flowed. I couldn’t stop. I went on for four pages, writing about the test, writing about how lousy I was doing in my English class, and then... yee-haw! I started writing about my “barren social life”: about the all the parties I hadn’t been invited to and my fear that I was a lousy dancer. I wasn’t “trying” to say anything; I was just letting it all out, spewing my feelings with unchecked honesty.
Two days later I wrote a second entry. Turns out I actually did OK on the math test, much to my amazement. And I was feeling good. I wrote about driving to a Junior Achievement meeting with some friends and singing a bunch of inappropriate songs on the way home. I even inserted the lyrics into the notebook. Something was happening: I wasn’t trying to churn out “good writing.” I was simply writing—giving words to my emotions and bringing them to life. I was finding, as I put it many years later, my voice.
And yeah, this is what growing up is all about. There’s nothing special or unique about any of this—it’s just a smattering of specificity. The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present, not by Santa but by Anne Frank... and so many others: my parents, of course. My friends. My teachers.
Indeed, I must take a moment to honor Mom and Dad. They gave me life, home, family—and something more: the permission, you might say, to go my own direction. This was not easy for them, especially for my mother, who was a devout Lutheran, who had to watch her son break from the church and head off in his own spiritual direction.
Among the books I read in high school, three of them had a serious impact on my becoming: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Their words were rocks for me to grab as I climbed the mountain of my emerging life. At one point, as I was writing in my journal, I made the declaration that I was a non-conformist. And one of the final tasks I had to fulfill before I graduated was to write my senior paper: a big-deal assignment. The topic could be of my choosing, but I had to quote a number of recognized authors. I chose the above trio. The paper was called “Is a Man’s Mind His Own?”
Yes, I wrote, it is.
I had sort of known this all along, though without necessarily even wanting it to be the case, except, as a boy, having the right to misbehave. But this was a serious step beyond boyhood. It was my first real step into the public domain. Uh oh. Now what?
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A Few Thoughts on This Admission: I Am Old
As more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition.
Sep 24, 2023
Much to my surprise, I find that I’m now part of a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.
I am old.
And indeed, it’s quite a shock to find that the world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did only 10 years ago. Growing old, it seems, is a condition that Western post-industrial society and culture do not consider meaningful, useful, or even valid. And yet, the truth is, and this is also a surprise, that as we become old, we enter a time of life, even with its losses and deficits, that is not a defective version of youth or middle age, but is something quite different, with its own qualities, discoveries, and surprises.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed.
“Ageism” is an attitude people inflict on themselves. Old people are what almost everyone will become. But somehow, this part of existence is treated as something that must be actively ignored, as if old age were an infectious disease transmitted by acknowledging it. Or a misfortune that can be averted by denying it. “You’re only as old as you think you are,” said my son recently. “Only young people think that,” I snapped. Contemplating dying and death is, it seems, more appealing than imagining being old.
Most books and articles on aging offer brisk, hard-nosed advice about patient management or wishful thinking packaged as self-help. But Atul Gawande has written with unsparing clarity about the bleak fate of institutional powerlessness, offered in the name of “care” and “safety,” which almost half of us face in old age. The number of euphemisms for “old” proliferate, as if by not using the word, we could forestall the fact. But the intense and complex inner experiences that come with aging are rarely probed.
We cannot escape the fact that old age is a time of loss. Old, we experience depletion in many parts of our lives. Our bodies and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. More difficult is the loss of friends and family and the changes in the social institutions where we once had a place. Most difficult and certainly most frightening is the threat or actual loss of mental capacity. None of these occurrences are part of how we thought of ourselves or planned our future. As we age, our lives become strangely unrecognizable. We realize that life is no longer in our control. And old age ends only when we enter a terrain that is truly and completely unknown.
Thus, more than any other time in life, old age is the time of deepest and most pervasive uncertainty. The uncertainty regarding our financial sustainability is not the least of these, but somehow comes to epitomize the perilousness of our situation. How we will manage being ourselves, being in our world, is no longer obvious. So we feel the world moving away from us. We can no longer reach out and grasp and cling, control and shape what’s happening. Our future is no longer limitless. It is genuinely and utterly unknowable.
But as the world becomes perhaps more distant and out of our control, we begin to see patterns we had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Our world, our selves become less stable and less secure. Everything is more intensely transitory. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because they and we are only together for this moment. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells, sudden sounds, temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. We take less and less for granted.
Late in their lives, Titian, Michelangelo, O’Keeffe, Tagore, Jean Rhys, Palladio, Daisy Loongkoonan, Paul Cézanne, Janáček, Maria Martinez, Stravinsky, and many others found new and unexpected ways of looking at themselves and their world. They continued and even extended their arts. In old age, as their bodies weakened and the world changed, they did not look away. Instead, in worlds of decline and loss, they experienced new tonalities, new music, new patterns. Having exhausted more conventional possibilities, they discovered new relationships to melody and harmony, to narrative, to color, form, light, and space. They found unforeseen paths, articulated subtleties and beauties never before encountered. The work they have left us and the stories of their lives are signposts for us.
This is not to say that we, the old, will all accomplish extraordinary things. But our situation, the actual experience of aging, is an opening for all of us. We here encounter something unexpected, sometimes frightening, sometimes revelatory. And now, as more and more of us live to advanced years, it is crucial to accept and even embrace our condition. This time of life offers new viewpoints in a world that cannot stop its habitual obsession with consuming and polluting. It does so, even as those who care for us cannot imagine our inner life, the uncertainty, peril, and, above all, the continued restless searching which is mind itself. Old age may seem too painful to contemplate and explore, but indeed we must. It is a time of life we might wish to ignore but which all of us, the living, will and must share. It is inevitable. And it is, in its own way, a gift.
For, as Thoreau once said, “Not ‘til we are lost… not ‘til we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
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Let Me Never Take Anyone’s Life For Granted Again
I’m trying to figure out what I may have just learned these past few days, even as I call out to the universe: “Enough!”
Aug 27, 2023
Realizing that I’ve been taking something for granted—one grain of infinity—is never an abstraction. It generally happens by whack and wallop.
Oh yeah, the knee. The knee. It’s kind of important.
A crucial part of the realization process is acknowledgment. Maybe even learning something. So, pardon the details I’m about to reveal, but I’m trying to figure out what I may have just learned these past few days, even as I call out to the universe: “Enough!” I don’t want any more life lessons for a while. (Come on, I’m only 77.)
It was as though we were getting to know each other at a level beyond the ordinary bounds of friendship, even best-friendship. This was something new. He was inside my life.
So what happened was, my long-time buddy, Malcolm—we’ve been best friends since 1967—came to town for a visit last week. Wow, cool. Two long-time-ago hippies on their own in Chicago. The world felt wide open. And I was host. However, the day of his arrival—as I lay in bed that morning—my right knee woke me up with a piercing poke in my consciousness. No, not again!
Yeah, this had happened before. Knee pain. I’d seen a doctor, had X-rays taken, gotten a cortisone injection. The pain stopped, my hobbling stopped, I felt in control of my life again. So, for this piercing poke in the joint to reappear a few hours before Malcolm’s arrival... not fair! I was determined to remain a functioning host. Things weren’t that bad. Just a little pain. But I could still, for instance, drive. I took us to a restaurant for dinner. Yeah, this’ll pass. We’ll have a great time.
And then things got worse. Next morning, it wasn’t just knee pain. Something new got added: excruciating ankle pain, seeming to come out of nowhere. Both knee and ankle were in the right leg, basically turning me into a one-legged guy. Standing up was an act of desperation. Moving a short distance was even worse. I was no longer the host. I was the guy on the couch—much of the time asleep, just because awakeness was too difficult. What was going on? I’d be lying there, then the ankle would quiver and twitch in pain and I’d lurch, then slowly drift back out of consciousness.
Malcolm, my guest, took care of everything. He walked to the market, bought a bunch of beans, made chili. He got everything I needed. He took the laundry downstairs and put it in the washing machine and, of course, eventually brought it back up. When he wasn’t working on something—and when I wasn’t asleep—he’d sit next to me on the couch and we’d talk. Oh, life!
This was not, you might guess, the visit either of us had anticipated, but he said—with occasional big smiles—that he was enjoying himself. It was as though we were getting to know each other at a level beyond the ordinary bounds of friendship, even best-friendship. This was something new. He was inside my life.
And finally we decided, two days into the visit, that I needed to go to the doctor. It was more Malcolm than me deciding this, because I was, at least partially, determined to transcend the pain, be bigger than it—to “defeat” it, or at least magically make it go away. Plus I couldn’t organize seeing the doc on my own. The plan was that he’d drive me to the clinic—an immediate care facility—that I’d been to several months earlier. We also understood that I couldn’t get out to the car on my own, or even with his help. He called 911.
Yeah, that was a first. I’d never been the subject of a 911 call. A firetruck showed up and four, or maybe it was five, firemen came to my door with a folding chair. I sat down, leaned back, and they ported me down the porch steps—in the rain, no less. This was not easy for them. The load was heavy, the steps were slippery. And being the liftee, wow, what a strange sense of helplessness.
They got me to my car. Malcolm drove to the clinic and wheeled me in. More X-rays. This was anything but easy, lifting myself out of the wheelchair, flopping onto the X-ray table. God have mercy!
But the doc was friendly and positive and she remembered me from my previous visit. She diagnosed my situation as both gout, in the ankle, and pseudo-gout in the knee, prescribing both pain and an anti-arthritic medication, and a short while later we were on our way back home. It was still raining.
Not hard. Just a drizzle. But it seemed to add a special buzz of strangeness to the day. And when we got back to the house—go figure! There weren’t any firemen waiting for us. Malcolm, two years my senior, was my only steadying force in this moment—helping me exit the car and then, holding me from behind, helping me walk with my cane and one functioning leg up the steps. This is where the “taking something for granted” part hit with full force.
Praise be for walking! What a miracle. What a wonder. When I got inside and collapsed on the couch, I let my mind comb the world and think about... oh, war, whatever. The stolen ability to walk, to simply be. Other people’s struggles are not an abstraction. Let me know this like I have never known this before. Let me never take life, theirs or mine, for granted again.
Then Malcolm drove to the drugstore and picked up my prescriptions. When he got back, he said, “My treat.”
The next morning, which happened to be my birthday, I couldn’t believe it. Both the knee and the ankle pain had vanished. I could walk again. And Malcolm headed off to the airport. His visit was over.
As I watched him leave, I found myself swimming in emotional wonder. We’ve been best friends for 56 years. Suddenly the awe I felt for our friendship—our love—was beyond comprehension.
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