Month: May 2024

Old Folks and the Wisdom of Appreciating Little Things

Younger people sometimes make fun of their elders for the simple pleasure we find in routine – waiting for the mail, afternoon tea, watching our favorite television show, knitting a sock, dead-heading the roses.  Somehow, they think small pleasures are signs of a diminished life.  However, there is every reason to believe that these are the constituents of the good life.  Maybe this is something we learn in our old age.

You may remember that at the end of Voltaire’s Candide, that satire of the optimistic philosophy that all things are for the best, Candide counsels us that we must all simply “cultivate our own garden.”  I have always thought that it was a way of reminding us that the worth of our lives, the joy of our lives, comes from paying attention to the small things that we do every day, the things that truly make up our lives.   As I have aged and the distractions of the outside world are more easily kept at bay, I have realized what good advice this is.

My husband and I have been reading Thomas Hardy lately, and at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge, I was quite taken by a passage which talks about the “ever-after” of Elizabeth Jane, a central character who has suffered much from the ups and downs of life:

Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

While you might not agree with Hardy that life is a “general drama of pain,” we must all agree that it is no Eden either. Hardy’s “solution” was akin to Voltaire’s:

As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt of it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody  not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider  interests cursorily embraced.

This talk of the cultivation and appreciation of “minute forms of satisfaction” is brilliant, I think, – and true.  I think of the little pleasures in our life – watching “Grantchester,” espresso on Saturday night, a good pasta dinner – what would life be without them?  Hardy is skeptical enough to put a caveat in (“to everybody not in positive pain”), but generally he gives us hope.

I wrote some years ago about the wonderful book by Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own.  It was based on a journal this amazing woman kept in an effort to try to ascertain what, really, made her happy:

I could not by direct effort feel love towards someone, or by direct effort make myself happy.  What then was entirely under the control of my will?  It seemed to me that the only thing that was even potentially so controlled was my attention.  I could not control what I saw when I looked in a certain direction, but I could, generally at least, control which direction I should look in.

And mostly, her attention and her joy were on the small moments of life.

When long-married couples are separated by death or disability, they often talk about missing the little things – the glass of wine after dinner, the game of Scrabble on Sunday afternoons, or the standing joke about who was going to wash the dishes.

Small pleasures should not crowd out the more important things in life (and this can begin to happen if we are not careful), but they should be valued for the fact that they often contribute to those more important things – chances to share love, restore our balance, touch base with who we are.

So, when young folks roll their eyes over our rituals and small attentions, just realize that they have a lot to learn.  And never neglect or take for granted the simple pleasures of life that last into old age.

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”