| Age puzzles me. I thought
it was a quiet time. My fifties were interesting, but my sixties are dynamic.
I grown more intense as I age. To my own surprise, I burst out with hot
convictions. Now I am so disturbed by the outer world, and by human quality
in general, that I want to put things right, as though I still owe a debt
to the world and life. We who are old, know that age is more than a disability.
It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times.
But something to be carried high. If it is a long defeat, it is also a
victory, meaningful for the initiates of time, if not for those who have
come less far.
Age is a desert of time. Hours, days, weeks and years. Perhaps with little to do. So one has ample time to face everything one has had, been or done. Time to gather them all in, those things that came from outside, and those that came from within. We have time at last to make them truly ours. It has taken me all the time I've had to become myself, yet now that I am older, there are times when I feel that I am barely here, as if there is no room for me at all. Is LIFE but another pregnancy? If that is so, than death is certainly a birth. By now it should be clear that the crucial people in the aging process are not the old, but rather the younger age groups. For it is these that determine the status position of the elderly in the social order. There is no real way out of this dilemma. For young and old alike, without a basic reordering of our national aspirations and values (of which the aged is but a token). Is there anything that can be done now? How can we talk honestly with the aged, if we continue to be segregated from each other? My belief is that we must stop herding them together, setting apart one side of the spectrum of life. Most of us have a half-conscious fear that one day we will find ourselves old, as though we had suddenly fallen from a cliff, and that what we will be then has little to do with what we are now. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aging will not separate the individual's present from his future self. We will not destroy the continuities between what he has been, what he is, and what he will be. Recognition of these ideals should help to build a bridge that crosses the psychological barriers between people of different ages. |