The Learning Journey
Conscious Aging
Interview on Embracing the Aging Process
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This is an interview I did with Barbie Gummin of TLC5. It introduces my upcoming book, Embracing the Aging Process. Look for it soon.
“Aging is a Triumph, Not a Tragedy”
So spake the great geriatrician, psychiatrist and elder advocate, Robert N. Butler, who died in December 2010. According to his biographer, W. Andrew Achenbaum, he helped
“…to transform the study of aging from a marginal specialty into an intellectually vibrant field of inquiry.”
Personally, I doubt I would have become an elder advocate myself without having had Butler’s books to teach me.
Robert N. Butler cover artRobert N. Butler, M.D. is the title of this just-published biography of the great man who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 book, Why Survive? Being Old in America and before that, in 1968, coined the term “ageism” as an analog to racism and sexism.
”Butler well understood that ignorance, prejudice, and stereotypes clouded the vision of vital, productive, fruitful aging that he wished to promulgate,” writes Achenbaum.
“In late life,” he continues, “Butler concluded that ageism was even more pernicious than he initially had realized…Butler now called ageism a disease, a morbid fear of decline and death that crippled individuals.”
Robert Butler may not have crushed ageism during his long career but his other achievements transformed attitudes and beliefs about old age that continue to help elders’ well being now and will continue to do so into the future.
Butler was appointed by President Gerald Ford to be the first director of the National Institute on Aging. Later he established the first U.S. department of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City.
In 1990, he founded the International Longevity Center (ILC-USA) to pursue the study of health and productivity of old people. Among the organization’s projects was the Age Boom Academy created in 2000 to
”…deepen the understanding on the part of 150 journalists of how the perils and promises of societal aging affected their respective news beats. Ideas germinated in the academy often found mass circulation,” explains Achenbaum.
In 2009, I was privileged to be one of the dozen journalists that year at the week-long Age Boom Academy – all expenses, as every year, paid in full. Dr. Butler brought together the crème de la crème of age researchers and experts from every sub-field imaginable and by the end, it was like being granted a masters degree in aging. Here is one of my stories about the Age Boom Academy.
[DISCLOSURE: Achenbaum quotes from my 2008 interview interview with Dr. Butler which you can read here.]
Achenbaum, who is professor of social work and history in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Houston, does a fine job of recounting Butler’s achievements that benefit elders – the remarkably large number of reasons the book is subtitled, Visionary of Healthy Aging.
But it is the many quotations from Achenbaum’s previously unpublished conversations with Butler along with the book’s epilogue – Butler’s unfinished “life review” in his own words – that most captured my attention.
Some thoughts from Butler you too may find provocative:
“Why do we have so much trouble enjoying the moment? This was not as true when we were children.”
“When a young person writes a novel he writes an autobiography; when an old person writes an autobiography, he writes a novel.”
“There is a dark side to the lives of those of wealth and privilege; they do not need to carry out the most elemental aspects of existence, the preparing of their own food and taking care of their own personal needs. In a perverse sense, elementality is a luxury of poverty.”
“Old age is no longer equivalent to disease, infirmity, frailty, decrepitude and slowing down. The brain is proving to be subject to repair and growth and this plasticity promises greater cognitive health.”
“The challenge is how to better understand, shape and value this new old age. Older persons themselves should define this portion of their lives, and not passively allow the culture to do so.
“They are the pioneers who have interest into the redefined old age and do not accept aging and disability as inevitable, unpreventable and untreatable. Society and culture, of course, have catching up to do.”
Growing Old with Grace
TIME GOES BY – Growing Old with Grace
Recently, I’ve been running across a lot of online writing about growing old with grace. Most of them are saccharine and say the same few things:
Stay active
Be social
Serve others
Laugh
Some throw in the phrase “stay in love.” That’s how you can tell it is mostly young people who write this stuff. They aren’t old enough to have lost a spouse of many decades yet. As to the first four – well, duh. But they speak more to health than grace.
Yes, that overused, well-worn idea that no two people define the same way. What I have come to after nearly 20 years of reading, studying and thinking about age is that a graceful old age cannot happen (whatever the definition) without accepting our age and saying farewell to our youth.
There is the perennial question about when is someone old. Many people – some who have commented on the subject at this blog – think 50 or 55 is still young.
Really? Anyone who hangs on to that belief hasn’t had to look for a job at that age. Workplace age discrimination starts at 40 – even 35 in the case of women – and it becomes painfully obvious in job interviews that even people your own age think you’re old.
In western culture, 50 to 55 is the beginning of old age. But that’s a good thing. Geriatricians and researchers who study aging tell us that on average these days, the diseases of old age don’t start to kick in until about age 75.
So if we do not deny that aging is inevitable and do not obsessively try to prolong youth, we have 20 or 25 years before we hit old-old age to discover, move toward and live in a stage of life that is as different and distinct as childhood is from adolescence and adulthood.
Oh, the books and movies and TV shows and 50-plus websites and anti-aging “experts” will incessantly proclaim that we must and can maintain the appearance and behavior of people 20 and 30 years younger by whatever means they are touting – chemical, surgical, pharmaceutical.
They foist examples upon us of “supergrans” and “supergrandads” who climb mountains at age 80 and skydive at 90, strongly implying that we who don’t are failing to keep up.
The best thing we can do is ignore them and rejoice in our aliveness for they believe only exteriors matter. If we don’t listen to them, we can continue to love ourselves however different our bodies become.
Be honest, now: does having a saggy, old body prevent you from being happy, prevent you from knowing pleasure, however you derive it? Of course, it doesn’t.
What makes any- and everyone beautiful in old age is acceptance of their years, of themselves as they are.
After about 60, it is a victory of sorts just to awaken in the morning. We can face each new day with sadness for our lost youth or with joy for our luck at reaching this time of life. It’s a personal choice.
We eagerly said farewell to childhood when adolescence beckoned and goodbye to that stage of life when adulthood was upon us. It is a mistake – one of monumental proportions, I believe – to cling to adulthood when age arrives.
Instead, when we accept the losses age imposes on us – youth, physical power, our position in society – say yes to old age, open ourselves to its mysteries and live every day in the present tense with passion and an open heart, we can’t help but experience this time as an opportunity for happiness, fulfillment, joy and in time, serenity.
In moving on from adulthood, we allow ourselves to grow into new dimensions of life and we get a chance at completion.
That is, at our own pace over the remaining years, we can review our pasts, learn to forgive our failures and trespasses, face our regrets – those coulda, shoulda, wouldas – find some peace and, maybe, wisdom.
I don’t want to waste those wonderful opportunities by pretending I’m not old enough for them.
In no way do I mean to dismiss the debilities and diseases that can shadow old age and make everyday life difficult. But I do mean to say that we can explore distant horizons even as our physical worlds may shrink. All we need to do is ignore the charlatans of anti-aging and most of all:
Adapt as circumstances require
Accept our limits with humor
Find new pleasures to replace the ones we must surrender
In these acts, I believe, we find grace in old age.
