As I come up for air a month after Dad’s Memorial Gathering, I find myself between two milestones on the road to becoming an aging parent myself. The first is the death of my last living parent on July 1 and the other is my husband Bill’s 50th high school reunion coming up at the end of September. While I don’t feel death breathing down my neck just yet as I said in my last post, it doesn’t mean I’m getting any younger.
There’s lots of advice out there for those of us who have passed age 65. Robert Butler’s last publication before his death, The Longevity Prescription, summarizes much of it. And while staying fit and healthy can’t be a bad thing, I often wonder if much of what we read about aging these days doesn’t have a lot to do with what David Ekerdt of the University of Kansas calls The Busy Ethic.
The busy ethic is the retired person’s version of the work ethic. Retired people can justify their leisured existence by being very active and engaged, preferably in ways that benefit society and the world. Or maybe, if retired people are not doing good works, it will be good enough just to keep busy checking off their bucket lists and reworking adolescence like the seniors in the reality series Sunset Daze.
As the much predicted “tsunami” of the old and infirm hits, retired people are likely to feel even more pressure to justify their continued existence on this beleaguered planet. What are those old folks doing—just taking up space? Even worse, they use up scarce resources and require expensive medical care that only makes them live longer. What good are they anyway?
Rather than requiring our old people to continue operating out of the values and standards of middle age, I hope we will open our eyes to the possibility of discovering new and unexpected value in our aging population. I want old people to feel free to explore unique ways of being that are expressive of their deepest selves.
I think the really scary thing about old people is that age frees them from the necessity to conform to social conventions. If we nurture this change instead of resisting it, the result may be that they find the freedom to explore and express new kinds of creativity, spontaneity and wisdom. Allan Chinen, author of In the Ever After, calls this “emancipated innocence”—a way of looking at the world that combines a child-like freshness of perception with the wisdom of long years of experience.
I see it in many of the comments on Paula Span’s post “Aging’s Misunderstood Virtues” in The New Old Age blog. People are finding themselves to be different than what they and others expected them to be at their age. It scares them a little until they find out that these changes are not only normal, but positive signs of ongoing growth and development. Perhaps if old people are freed to become more truly and deeply themselves, that alone will make the world a better place.
