Category Archives: Aging

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Retirement

This is life.

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Imbolc                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

Sunday night Kate and I went to St. Anthony Main, overlooking the Mississippi and St. Anthony Falls, for a Roots Music festival put on by KBEM, a local jazz station.  While we ate at the Aster Cafe and listened to a small group, Kate looked up at me and said, “Ah, the life of the retiree.”

I understood what she meant.  Free at last.  But….

I had another reaction too, “Yes, I know what you mean.  But, really.  This is life.  Not retired life, but life itself.”

In that moment I realized the category mistake everyone makes when speaking of retirement.  It is seen as special, different, unique, something to be fussed over and transitioned into when really it’s just life, life continuing.  Not different, not special, not unique, not to be fussed over.

Or, to say the same thing another way.  It is different, special, unique, to be fussed over because it is your life, your life, your one and only special and true life.  We have to want our life and lead our life before we work, while we work and after we work.  We do vacate the workplace, but we do not retire from our lives.

In fact, the fuss is too often that we’ve left our lives up to others.  Our boss, our clients, our patients, our corporation or agency.  The past times and activities that seem so necessary, but are really only the ideas of others.

So, the problem and the promise lies not within the change in our work, but with the change in ourselves.  If we have known what our life is, if  we have chosen activities and friends for their intrinsic value not their external rewards, well, then, on with your life.  If not, the issue is not the transition, but the need for self-examination, for honesty with the you that you bring to life as  you grow older.  No one else can do this work for you.  It’s up to you.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Breakfast in Silence

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Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Woolly Mammoths

Obits Optimists

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Imbolc                                                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

The most optimistic page in the newspaper?  The obituaries.  Every day and especially on Sundays I see evidence of the hopefulness and optimism of Minnesota citizens.  I imagine it’s the same everywhere.  With no evidence for an afterlife at all, let alone a particular one, person after person greets their mother and father, relaxes in the arms of their Lord and Savior Jesus, are welcomed by God the Father or pass over to their next adventure.  The range of metaphysical perspectives may be narrow, usually encompassing some version of the Christian afterlife or the less well understood world of late 19th century spiritualism, the passing over folks, but the confidence and clarity braces me every time I read it.

I’ve not done a comprehensive study of obituaries, let alone a cross cultural one (though it would be fascinating), but it seems likely each place has its own, culturally specific brand of confidence about the unseen world.  In ancient Rome a favorite epitaph mentioned here before:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care. represents a very different take on the after death experience, one more in tune with my own existentialist one, though I’m not as nihilistic.  I do care, at least now, about my death, though, with my Roman fellow travelers, I’m pretty sure that after death I won’t care either.

This kind of optimism has ancient roots.  Certain Neanderthal remains have been found with ochre painted on the body, indicating some thoughts about life after the grave.  Just what that thought was, of course, we have no idea, but burying a body and decorating it moves well beyond the animal world’s relative disregard for their dead; relative because elephants do have mourning rituals*.

The new atheists like to lampoon all this as magical thinking or evidence that the human race has not yet grown up, but there are ways of looking at it.  To my mind it is a poetic, metaphoric way of declaring that the person’s memory will live on among there descendants and friends.  It also a means of consolation in the face of a forever event, perhaps the first one the family has experienced.  Since there is no evidence, it is possible that one of the many perspectives has got it right.

Long ago I made a pact, a version of Pascal’s wager, with the afterlife.  I will live my life in as straightforward and useful a way as I can, being true to my own understanding of the world.  With Camus I stand with those who would make the trip toward the great river of death easier for all.  If, as I suspect, death is a personal extinction event, then the wager ends.  If there is a supernatural being who cares about living entities and their future, then the minor or even major screw ups in my life will be forgiven since their/its perspective will embrace all things, giving a context to any individual life that even the most forgiving friend cannot.  Either way, I’m ok. Continue reading Obits Optimists →

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Still Examining

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Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bridgit Moon

Greg Membres, my Latin tutor, recommended a film, The Examined Life.  You may have seen it already since it was made in 2008, but it’s a powerful introduction to some fundamental philosophical questions like ethics, the meaning of life, political theory.

One truth struck me more powerfully than any other while watching this movie.  I imagined, when I was in high school and then in college, that there was an upward and onward nature to learning, a steady progression in which high school and college pushed me, and a progression that would give me enough momentum to take my life up the mountain, all the way to the top, that somehow learning and life would be a regular unfolding of answers and conclusions.  After, maybe, my sophomore year I began to realize this was a mistaken view, not only mistaken but might have had reality actually inverted.

That is, I was never more certain of the truth than when I was in college and then, later, in seminary.  Life since then has offered a sometime gradual, sometimes sudden degradation of both the things I know for sure and the things I know at all.  An abstract thinker by nature and inclination, I found it logical, desirable to hunt for truth in the abstract systems of philosophy, theology, theoretical approaches to various disciplines.  At one point, in fact, I wanted to study the theoretical foundations of anthropology in graduate school.  Turns out not many graduate schools had much interest.  In either the discipline or me studying it.

As life experience and longer thought has lead me to reconsider many of my core positions, I have abandoned Christianity, the liberal politics of my father, the traditional roles of men and women, boys and girls, the positive assumptions about capitalism with which I was acculturated, the metaphysics of Rene Descartes which still informs our unexamined ontology, a soul, an afterlife, respect for the government, though not for democracy itself.  These are not trivial decisions, nor were any of them made lightly nor suddenly.

On some of the big questions like the meaning of life, I have chosen to abandon my search.  Life is what we are, it is what we do and needs no abstract cover story for its purpose.  This may be too minimalistic for many and I get that, but for me, I find my purpose in life itself, the living of it that includes marriage, family, friends and  actions that press for greater justice, a sustainable future, a climate that will not kill us.

Though I’m not a complete cultural relativist, I’m pretty damn close.  Murder, oppression, suppression, starvation, unchecked disease, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination of any kind are wrong, in my view, universally.  In almost all other matters, I’m more than open to different cultural perspectives and practices, I expect them, celebrate them and would find the world shallower and morally impoverished without them.

Still working on this, noodling it.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Life Review

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Imbolc                                                       Waxing Bridgit Moon

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Cornel West   

So, valentine’s day is a justice holiday, too.  I like it.  I met Cornel West in 1974, when we were both much younger.  We attended a week-long conference on liberation theology at Maryknoll College in Detroit.

Since the retreat, I’ve begun looking back, seeing my life as a whole rather than in its most immediate reality.  There’s a task here, called integrity (see below), defined by Erik Erikson, a task in which we review our life and decide if it has threads, through lines, think about its cogency as a work of art.

Maturity(65 to death) Ego Integrity vs. Despair Reflection on Life Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.

This is a delicate task, I think, since most of us, myself included, don’t see our lives slowing down or as less productive or even, in important ways, discontinuous with the life preceding.  That aspect, the final, end note aspect of Erikson seems premature, but the task itself is one that can begin now, that is, in our mid-60s.

There is a need, it seems, for a 7.5 or an 8.0 followed by integrity as a 8.5.  Jung, who broke with Freud early, earlier in his career than Erikson did, sees the second half of life as an inward journey, a preparation for dying, but, also, a recipe for living.  It is this aspect that seems left out of Erikson’s model, that contemplative, meditative facet of life as we pull away from the world of engagement toward a world of the inner journey.  So, I see this ego integrity task as a subset of a more important turn, the turn from achievement and goals, to the interior, to the inner cathedral, the cultivation of the deep Self.

Life review certainly fits as a section of the inward journey, but it fails to acknowledge the still active, still an agent, role of our lives up to our death.  We need to retain agency, to take responsibility for the journey now, just as we have in the past.  Still, there is no question that getting older means taking stock, reviewing our past, but it cannot dampen the vitality and purposive nature of life even in our 80s and 90s and 100s.

Aging, Family, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Good Birthday

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

Relearning old lessons.  Today I went to the capitol to do some lobbying.  While there, Justin (Sierra Club lobbyist) and I met with a member of the legislature whose outline was a bit murky relative to our issues.  We found an ally, someone we can work with who has the ear of folks we can’t reach directly.  It was a fun and helpful meeting.birthday-stupa-james-johnson

A lot of people sent wishes for a good day on my birthday.  Nothing is a better present for me than finding an ally in unexpected places.

Kate made me two wonderful shirts, both short sleeved, Hawaiian like shirts.  When it gets warmer, you’ll see them.  Having a wife that sews and quilts is a great gift.  Oh, and she’s good at diagnosis, too.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes.  Brother James Johnson, aka Dusty, sent me a birthday stupa:

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me?

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Imbolc                                                 Waxing Bridgit Moon

Iconic birthdays.    Sweet sixteen.  18-old enough to die.  21–when I was young, this was THE iconic birthday.  Ok to drink.  Woops.  A few years later I was an alcoholic.  Then for my generation there was 30.  We didn’t trust anybody over 30.  Uh-oh.  That came and went.  Then, 40.  40 was a big one because it was the time you might buy a red sports car, hunt for that trophy wife and make strange vocational decisions.  Close.  I met Kate, my wife who has been a wonder and a major Valentine ever since we got serious.  I made a strange vocational decision.  Got out of the ministry and in to writing.  Yes, there was, too, that little red sports car.  Bought it in 1994.  OK, I was 47, but hey.  Still driving it.  There was another major birthday for me, 46.  My mother died at age 46.  To pass your own mother’s age is a strange sensation, I imagine, at any age, but at 46, it seemed more than strange.  Sad. Painful. Happy to be alive.

After those, 50 was not a big deal.  60 was 60.  I mean it’s a big deal in a way, but still, the only thing I felt was that I had passed into the new late middle age.

But.  64.  Now that’s a biggy.  Wouldn’t have been I suppose if not for that Beatle’s song.  It managed to set a date for a change in attitude, a time when our life and love might change, might change so much that we would ask if we were still necessary to the people we love.  That’s too grim a statement for the light-hearted tenor of the song, but I think it did capture a fear resident in many a then 20+ years old heart at the time it came out:  what can life be like when we’re old?

Those of us in the baby boom generation had created an entire culture around youth, rebellion, drugs and rock and roll.  Sgt. Pepper came out in June of 1967.  The summer of love.  Wearing flowers and heading for San Francisco.  How could acid-dropping, hard rock lovin’, anti-war, free love folks like us ever grow old.  When I’m 64 was like a time that would never come.

Of course, no generation, at least none so far, gets to re-write the rules of aging.  We passed through our 20s, then our 30s, then 0ur 40s and 50s and have now begun to crest upon the shore of social security and medicare.  We have started to hit our mid-60’s.  As iconic ages go, of course, the big one for years was 65.  The finish line.  Throw away the work clothes, grab the gold watch and go golfing, then fishing, then drop dead.  Not now.

We hit 64 and we’ve just begun to pick up speed.  It’s not an age; it’s a speed limit.

Suddenly we’re here, many of us, and we realize that the song was written by youngsters.  It expressed their and our fear of moving on beyond the wonder of the sixties.  What would it be like?  What could it be like?

I’m happy to report that it’s just fine.  Just as I told Kate, yes I still need you and yes I’ll still feed you; she tells me the same.  We have come a long ways from the days of the summer of love and the march on Washington.   Those were great days, so are these.  I’m happy to be 64.

Aging, GeekWorld, Humanities

68. My Driver’s License Will Be Good Until I’m 68? Hmmm.

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Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bridgit Moon

There are those moments.  Drove over to Ramsey city hall (municipal center sounds much more… what?), walked through the glass doors and the 20 foot high atrium, all in stone and glass, followed the signs and found the License Center.  I filled out a form, missing four questions, handed to the nice lady and she clipped the ear off my current driver’s license, collected my $24 (a fee, not a tax) and took me over to the vision machine.  Wonder of wonders, for the first time in 8 years, I passed.  How about that?  Up against the blue wall, smile.  “Great picture!” the nice lady said.

The real shocker?  This new license will be good until I’m 68.  68!  How did that happen again?

Tonight I’ll get a call from the network guy to see if he can walk me through the problem that’s keeping my printer from shaking hands with my two new computers.  Well, sorta new.  Decided I’m going to RTFM the backup stuff.  I really oughta know how to work this stuff, otherwise, what’s the point of backing stuff up?

End of the week.  Another legcom meeting under my belt, the Titian walk through and some quality time with the exhibit yesterday and today Latin.  My Ovid work drew nice remarks from my tutor.  He essentially agreed with my translation.  As a rough draft.  Which it was.  My English to Latin was a little more fuzzy, showing that I whipped through it faster than is required to do good work.  I’m still working on Diana and Actaeon.  I’d like to finish it before the show leaves.

Each segment, the legcom, the Titian preparation and the Latin, requires serious prep work.  Makes me feel good, sorta like exercise.  Which, by the way, I gotta go do.

Aging, Holidays, Writing

At The Midnight Hour

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

Reading the pages from Missing, making marks here and there with my pencil, amazed at the material that has come from me, from some part of me, a part I may not know well myself.  A strange feeling, as if a new relation were to be discovered in a family, familiar, yes, but whose origins are unclear.

The night has fallen and the temperature has dropped to zero, an odd idea, it seems to me, a place between high and low, a balance point below which we know cold lurks, a point of no temperature, zero.  Odd.

Kate worked tonight, as she did last Wednesday, seeing 19 patients.  That’s her old pace, back before the pains began.  If she did it night after night, it would debilitate her, but now she doesn’t return to work until the 14th.

Valentine’s Day is my birthday, as it has been for 63 years, soon to be 64.  Inching toward the 65th, still one of those birthdays, a turning point, a bridge.  One more year to go.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Humanities, Retirement, Woolly Mammoths

Words.

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Imbolc                                                            Waxing Bridgit Moon

“Belief in the truth commences with the doubting of all those ‘truths’ we once believed.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

This intellectual bomb-thrower has always been a favorite of mine though I’ve not ready any of his stuff cover to cover.  A recent bio tries to make him into a closet hyper-religious, but if he is he did the damndest job of hiding it.  Sometimes I think an atheist is just an atheist and not a cigar.

I have felt the force flowing with me ever since the retreat.  There’s something about being lifted in the mosh pit of old friends that buoys the soul.  I’ve got out the pages of Missing I’ve written so far and am finishing an edit/revision I began a while ago, then I’m going to pick up the keyboard and set byte to screen.  Kate and I also identified a week in March when I can go back out to Blue Cloud and work intensively on the novel.  I’m still weighing it since it seems indulgent, but, hey, maybe it’s time for this kind of indulgence.

We had our business meeting this morning and I had a post-retirement anxiety tremor, so we ran numbers out past 2012.  Hah.  As if it matters.  After 2012.  Just in case, though, we ran them anyhow and the numbers do begin to make sense when looked at over a period of time.  My tremor quieted.

Had a call this morning from a brother asking for some reassurance.  I gave it, though I’m not sure how my input helped. It’s humbling to be asked for such a thing.

Met with Leslie, the UU student at UTS that I’m mentoring this year.  It’s fun to watch a young person, she’s my age when I was in Sem, go through the back and forth of this strange vocation, ministry.  Had I a chance to do it over again, knowing what I know now, I would have worked at McDonald’s.  No.  Not really.  But, I wouldn’t have gone into the ministry.  Maybe art history.  Maybe politics full time.  Maybe something else, but I wouldn’t have ended up in the ministry.  But, I did.  Go figure.