Month: October 2025

The Bhagavad Gita in Old Age

There are many reasons to study the Gita in our old age – just ask Gandhi.  Verse 36 of Chapter 4 of the Bhagavad Gita encourages us: “Even though thou be the most sinful of sinners, thou shalt cross the ocean of misery by the boat of knowledge.”  In Gandhi’s commentary (recommended), the Mahatma addresses this passage from the standpoint of old age:

For me, the Gita is the ship, not because it is a learned work but because I have liked it, it has appealed to me in my old age, and verses in it have been a great support to me.

I agree with Gandhi on this, but with caveats.  The Gita is a tricky document.  It would seem to be the story of a strange blue God (Krishna) exhorting a young warrior (Arjuna) to get out on the battlefield and kill people, and yet Gandhi found his doctrine of non-violence in it.  It is a war story that describes the war within us.

Again, the Gita is a little slippery, and many people have gotten it wrong.  There was a popular book a few years back that assumed that the Gita was telling us to follow our bliss.  That might be good advice, but it is not what the Gita is saying.  The Gita’s message is more complex; it is more nuanced; it is more like life.  I hope I can convey some of the complexity and the relevance of the Gita to aging – but, of course, you must read it for yourself.

I recently watched a golf movie that was based on the message of the Gita called The Legend of Bagger Vance.  Good movie (directed by Robert Redford), but it didn’t quite hit the mark.  However, the movie was close enough to get me to read the novel that it was based on, and that was indeed fortuitous.  The novel, by Steven Pressfield, is somewhat drenched in the intricacies of golf.  (I admit to skipping the long paragraphs in the sand traps.)  I noted, when I have written about the Gita before, that Krishna values devotion of any kind – perhaps even devotion to the game of golf?  The author has Bagger (the Krishna figure) tell us that “all sport is holy, for it embodies the objectified search for the subjective experience of yoga, meaning the union, union with the divine.”  But golf is even better because:

In other sports the opponent is regarded as the enemy.  We seek by our actions to disable him…This is not the way to salvation, or more accurately, it is at one remove.  The golfer on the other hand is never directly affected by his opponent’s actions.  He comes to realize that the game is not against the foe, but against himself.  His little self… (121)

Read The Legend of Bagger Vance, but please read the Gita first.

The Gita pops up in unexpected places.  Thoreau took Emerson’s copy with him to Walden.  Emerson’s poem “Brahma” is all but lifted from the Gita.  Whitman scribbled in his copy.  Philip Glass wrote an opera using only the words of the Gita.  Such references abound – there is even a Gita for the CEO.  And I recently found another interesting citation.

It is my daily practice to read the lectionary of the Episcopal Church, wherein are noted feast days for people of note.  Being curious, I often look up the souls honored there and thus came across the rather incredible Vida Dutton Scudder, whose feast day is on October 10.  An American scholar, philanthropist, sometime pacifist, and activist, she also wrote a book about old age called The Privilege of Age, which I have been unable to find.  I did, however, find her autobiography, On Journey, which was written in her seventies.  In it, Scudder chronicles how, born in India as a child of Christian missionaries, she returned to England as a toddler when her father died in a swimming accident.  He left her his books, among which was an early translation of the Gita.  In Scudder’s long memoir, we get much about her participation in the Christian church, her development of settlement houses and retreat centers and the teaching of the principles of social work – her exemplary life goes on for hundreds of pages.  But she reserves the precious last few paragraphs for the Gita.  Specifically, she talks about how the Gita has prepared her for old age (Scudder lived into her nineties), and how the Gita’s admonition to care about the work, but not the results of the work. has taught her to let go of what went before.  It also taught her courage:

…I turned to the Gita in the Great War, to dispel hesitant scruples.  Then it taught me fearlessness, and gave me courage to accept the moral risks in action.  Now the days of action are passed, does the somnolence of age creep over me?… The Gita shall say the last word; it is a word of comfort, it is still better, a word of hope:

“Following the Rule, cleansed of spirit, victorious over himself…his self becomes the Self of all born beings…. Putting away utterly all loves born of purpose, little by little, he shall win stillness [quoted from Gita 6].

The second chapter of the Gita famously tells us that “Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits.”  In old age, it is often hard not to live in mourning for the fruits of our actions – individually or collectively.  If we do so, we are not meeting the challenge of the moment, not facing the work that is before us of aging and death.  And we must use what energies we have left to do the work that is left to us, while not relinquishing the stillness and peace that is our right.

If you have never read the Gita, please read it.  Read it for the first time without many annotations.  If you want to go further, there are some wonderful commentaries out there, including those by Gandhi (based on his talks) and Eknath Easwaran.  Easwaran has a one volume translation with an excellent introduction, as well as a separate three-volume commentary.   And if anyone has a copy of Scudder’s Privilege of Age, please let me know!  She published an essay of that title in the Atlantic in 1933 which I have, but the full book was published in 1939.

Getting Old in the Time of Trump

From the outside, one might think that seniority is in ascendancy.  One might even think we are living in a gerontocracy.  For the last decade or so, we have had elderly presidents and elderly leaders in congress.  We have one of the oldest senates in history, with an average age of sixty-four.  At seventy-nine, Trump is even older than I am; one might expect that this senior president would have more compassion and respect for the elderly.  One might, of course, wish that Trump would have more compassion and respect for everyone.

Before I lay out some of the problems with growing old in the age of Trump, let me acknowledge that there was a senior tax cut in the “Big Beautiful Bill.”  Beginning this year and ending in 2028, it increases the standard deduction for individual seniors by $6,000.   Thank you, Donald, but it hardly makes up for the angst you have caused in other areas.

Elders have a long list of things to worry about these days.  Relentless and inhuman immigration enforcement has meant that nursing homes and seniors who need home care are having more and more trouble finding caregivers.  Lack of immigrant help on the farms (along with tariff increases) has meant that food prices have increased.  With the war on alternative energy, there are predictions that energy costs will rise and air quality will decline.  Medicaid cuts mean that the impoverished elderly have become more vulnerable as benefits – including potentially nursing home care – disappear.  Medicare and Social Security seem vulnerable in ways that we have not seen for many years.  And we feel we have to defend ourselves against things we don’t really understand, but which the government is letting loose on us – like AI and cryptocurrency.

Senior citizens worry about the increased dissension in the country and within our families.  Trump loves a good fight, and he surely doesn’t mind turning us all against one another.  There seems to be little common ground between Trumpers and liberals, and this dissension has invaded Thanksgiving dinners, weddings, even memorial services.  Seniors fret about children who don’t speak to each other, holiday dinners that are no longer events to be looked forward to. We all fret over family members who can’t be pried away from the particular biases of Fox News.

One of the saddest stories in this regard was the one that the wonderful author Marilynne Robinson told about her own mother, who had moved into an assisted living center and was soon spending her days watching conservative television with her new friends, and bemoaning that her daughter was receiving awards from Obama, who she was sure was a Muslim.

“With a little difficulty we [her mother and herself] finally reached an accommodation, an adult friendship,” she writes. “Then she started watching Fox News.” Her mother and her fellow retirees began to share “salacious dread over coffee cake,” fretting over the rumored “war against Christmas.” “My mother lived out the end of her fortunate life in a state of bitterness and panic, never having had the slightest brush with any experience that would confirm her in these emotions, except, of course, Fox News,” Robinson writes (quoted from a review of Robinson’s What Are We Doing Here? in the NYTimes).

Elders worry about their children or grandchildren who are losing their jobs (even those formerly “safe” federal jobs) and those who might get sent to fight in our own cities. Grandparents (who lived through most of the relevant diseases and know whereof they speak) decry the parents who refuse to vaccinate their grandchildren.    Mostly this is  because they worry about the grandchildren, but it is also because we are afraid of catching the flu, Covid, and other bugs that the children will now be more likely to bring with them when they come to visit.

Old folks with fixed incomes and limited resources know well how the volatility in prices, the stock market, and national mood can make a good day into a fretful one.  The news relays one crisis after another to our fearful ears.   The current shutdown is making travel worrisome; we have a family wedding next month which involves air travel, and we can only hope things will be more normalized by then.

But none of these things is the worst of it.  The worst of it is that Trump displays the stereotypical idiosyncrasies of the elderly – radical conservatism, miserliness, covetousness, blind willfulness, vengefulness.  There are many fine and thoughtful old people; there are many seventy-nine-year-olds that I would trust with my life.  Last week I talked about models for getting old.  The worst thing for old people about Trump is that, in my opinion, he is the very worst of models – both for us elders and for all the younger people behind us who are getting older every day!

And there is one more thing.  He makes us afraid.  As I finished this blog entry, I waffled about whether to publish such outright criticism of our president – not because one shouldn’t criticize the president, but because he is also the very model of vindictiveness.  There, I have said my piece on this No Kings Day.

One last reminder, the negative stereotypes of old age that Trump represents go back to Horace and beyond.  We might compare Saint Benedict’s more positive view of aging as a gift to be properly used.  In the Prologue to his Rule, Benedict tells us that if we grow old it is by way of a truce with God, so that we may have time to “amend our misdeeds” and “to safeguard love.”  Just sending that out there.

Models for Aging?

The Baby Boomers were a generation that suffered from lack of models.  It wasn’t that our parents and grandparents were not admirable people, heroes even, but they did not live the lives that we lived in the times that we had to live them.  Many women who worked their entire adult lives grew up with stay-at-home moms.   Even if our moms worked, the model out there was the carefully coiffed young mother with an apron and a roast in the oven.  Think of June Cleaver or Lucy Ricardo.  Men of our generation did not learn what it meant to have a working wife, not to have dinner on the table when they got home from work, how to handle demands for assistance with domestic chores.  The result was that not only did we work ridiculously hard at home and at work (we did have models for a work ethic), but we were always feeling guilty about not being able to be the kind of parents, husbands, and wives that our parents were.

Then there were relationships.  When I was a child, divorce was never discussed – and even if it did happen, no one talked about it.  And yet, even today, baby boomers divorce more than any other age group: Another life event that we had no template for, and, again, that nagging guilt if it happened to us. 

We must remember that, as children, we soaked up so much unconsciously.  We learned the complexity of language – the words, the grammar, the pronunciation.  We absorbed social norms – ways of eating, sleeping, interacting.  And now we are getting old. We surely absorbed something about what it means to grow old, and – whether we are conscious of it or not – it is affecting us now that we ourselves are old.

When we were children, our models for growing old were our grandparents, who often did not live to be as old as we are now.  They might have been stern (my Dutch paternal grandmother) or doting (my maternal Nana and Papa).  I did not think much as a child about how they lived, but it surely had an influence.  There were other elderly relatives, most of whom seemed like another species.  Surely, we would never look like that!

And our culture provided few positive templates in our formative years for senescence.  Coming of age novels (Bildungsromans) and movies abounded – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye – but coming of old age stories (Vollendungsromans) were scarce on the ground and rather scary.  There were tales like Heidi, in which an old person gets rescued from isolation and depression by a younger one.  But novels about old people who were interesting in themselves, potential models, were few.

Think of fairy tales.  The protagonists (often princes and princesses) were always young and beautiful.  The evil stepmother was old.  The witches were old.  Consider Arthur Rackham’s illustration from Hansel and Gretel with a very scary witch of advanced years (here).

The stories usually ended with the witch in the oven, the adventure complete, and a wedding, with no note about what happened as the characters aged.  The Grimms’ classic telling of Cinderella ends like this:

And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill-treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, cried:

That she forgave them with all her heart, and desired them always to love her.

She was conducted to the young prince, dressed as she was; he thought her more charming than ever, and, a few days after, married her. Cinderella, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the Court.

There are many things to be noted here, but generally, marriage is the end of the story.  Cinderella is always beautiful and bountiful and young in our imaginations.  We wanted to be Cinderella and have no model of an old Cinderella.

Songs of our youth assumed that “forever young” was the way to be.  Even songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” or Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” assume that upon adulthood, all magic is gone.  Old folks make no appearances.  The movements of the sixties didn’t trust anyone over 30, and it never occurred to us that we would someday be old.

So here we are trying to work out the best way to be old.  The aged folks in Washington surely have not figured it out.  The drunk crowd in Margaritaville don’t seem to have the answer.  But there are clues out there.  And the first step might be to be more aware of our ingrained assumptions.

Around me, there are various models – positive and negative.  There’s the “let’s see the world and spend our money before we die” folks.  There are those kind souls who sacrifice their time and resources to take care of grandchildren so that their kids can avoid daycare and afford a house.  There are those who spend their time and resources in keeping fit mentally and physically, and have a weekly array of classes and therapy sessions.  There are those who secluded themselves during Covid and never fully emerged.  And everything in-between.

While I was writing this, I heard that Jane Goodall had died – at age 91 and while out on the road doing speaking engagements, active and with a project to the end.  An article about her in the NYTimes (What Jane Goodall Taught Us About Living a Long Life) which extols her for staying active, having a purpose, and having an optimistic view about things in general, including the afterlife.  Of course, Jane Goodall was no ordinary woman and we all need more relatable models.  Or, of course, we could structure our own.  I’m just trying to encourage myself and all of us to do it consciously.  Any suggestions are welcome.  And we must remember that – although they could not seem to care less – our grandchildren are watching.

For me, reading and writing are ways to explore alternatives. I have written several reviews of novels about old people (see here and here).  Many of my short stories involve older people trying to come to terms with where they are in life.    You might try my short stories “Closing Time” or “Snickerdoodles” – or write your own.