Month: July 2026

Constructive Forgetting

I’m still thinking about single-pointedness and the mass of things we need to “unlearn” in our old age.  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death:

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.

I spent my second quarter-century
Losing what I had learnt at university.

And refusing to take in what had happened since.
Now I know none of the names in the public prints… (“The Winter Palace”)

“Unlearning” sounds like something bad, a sin against progress – and yet it is probably the only way to comprehend and accept old age and death.  And one of the things we have to unlearn is both the ability and the desire to multitask.

Our generation learned to multitask with a vengeance.  Women (like me) were trying to figure out how to raise kids and have a career, while dealing with cascading technology – all at the same time.  Men were discovering that they weren’t married to their mothers and that they had no models for the new family life.  Frequent divorces amongst the baby boomers (the highest rate of any generation) meant that single parents had to figure out yet another set of staggering complexities.  Radios and televisions were constantly on – radios in the car and TVs at home – adding a level of input to already frenetic lives.  We were (at the same time) proud of our ability to talk to the babysitter on the phone while writing a report at work, yet increasingly frantic about coping.

When the kids left home (if they did), life got a little easier, but not much.  There was always a new computer system to learn at work, social media emerged as a distraction, and life was still messy.  And finally, we retired.  Time to meditate, concentrate on the important things – except we had forgotten how.

I don’t know about you, but my ability to be single-minded, one-pointed, to concentrate over long periods of time was shot.  I am fine doing Wordle, making supper, or doing other “short” tasks, but even with lots of quiet time on my hands, I have trouble sustaining “long” concentration. and I am not the only one.  Elizabeth Bishop bemoaned the “Art of Losing” as one grew older, but I put my hat in Larkin’s ring.  There are many things I would like to lose.

Many elders do continue to proudly multitask, as we keep ourselves busy juggling our pickleball, travel schedule, volunteer jobs, and Botox appointments.  Or we throw ourselves into the lives of our children and grandchildren. And remember that even having the TV on in the background puts you in multi-tasking mode! There is nothing intrinsically wrong with any of this, but I’m not sure that it really helps us to “know more as [we] get older.”

In his Convivio, Dante pictures the course of life as a parabola. We go up and we come down.  The “high point” of the parabola is around age thirty-five, a date Dante arrives at based on Christ’s death in this thirty-fourth year. “It was not fitting that his divinity should be present in something that was in decline.”  What, exactly, is “in decline” in the latter part of life?  What is “diminishing”?  I can give you a long list: teeth, endurance, bone density, strength – and you may add your own infirmities.  But, is there something waxing that compensates for that which is waning?  There is nothing very positive about losing your hair or teeth, but in losing reflexive multi-tasking, I think there is a gain.

My grandparents were wary of new technology; they finally bought a black and white TV, but it wasn’t on often and they spent hours just sitting on the back porch.  Papa often smoked his pipe and Nana picked at some knitting or embroidery, but for long periods of time the pipe and the needles just sat on their laps.  As a child, I couldn’t begin to imagine what they were thinking about.  Now I wish I could ask them.

Looking back over experience is one thing that time and concentration allow.  In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the “slow” review of experience is extolled:

The compensation of growing old…was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained – at last! – the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence, the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

And in Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, Lady Slane calls “looking back on the girl she had once been” as the “last, supreme luxury…. She could lie back against death and examine life.”

There is more than memory than one-pointedness allows, but it is hard to get there.  For reading, it is recommended that longer and more difficult books be tried in stages.  And so it is with concentration.  It is not a matter of fighting distractions.  It is a matter of acknowledging them and putting them away as no longer needed, I think.  But any suggestions are welcome.  I’ll leave you with this excerpt from “New Year’s Resolve” by May Sarton:

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

I am in constant search of “still water.”

For a story about remembering and forgetting, you might try my “Amnesia at the Airport.”

 

 

 

 

What’s the Point? Where is the Perspective of Old Age?

In conjunction with my old age “serenity project,” I have been working more diligently on my meditation, trying to get to a “one-pointed” concentration.  I am actually very disciplined about meditation – an hour in the morning and another forty-five minutes in the afternoon, but “showing up” does not always mean progress.  To meditate, one can start by focusing on almost anything – your breath, the sound of the birds, bodily sensations – but the key is to limit intrusions of memories, worries, plans – and this is a challenge for me.  T. S. Eliot reminds us that it is the “still point of the turning earth,” where “the dance is.” This sounds surprisingly similar to what the Taoists say about a “single-pointed” mind: “A mind that is clearly focused, however, receives all things and can abide in utter tranquility. It is no exaggeration to say that its world revolves around it.”   If we could only get our minds down to that one, still point.

Pinhole cameras are a good metaphor for one-pointedness.  Such cameras were widely used in the 19th century, but even before that, artists used pinhole mechanisms to reflect subjects and scenes onto paper for tracing.  The principle is the same as that of a camera obscura, in which a pinhole lets in a sliver of light which opens into an upside-down image of whatever it is pointed at.  A few years ago I visited one of the world’s oldest camera obscuras in a windmill in Dumphries, Scotland.  That camera projects inverted images of the whole city in a darkened room and has been in continuous operation since 1836.

For our metaphor, it is relevant that the images from a pinhole are upside down.  In old age, aren’t we looking at life from an upside-down and backward position?  We are remembering  more than planning, we are trying to distill sense out of what has already happened rather than struggling to make things happen. To do this, we need to get down to that single point, and after a lifetime of striving to multi-task, this is not easy.

For pinhole cameras or camera obscuras, the smaller the pinhole, the sharper the image.  And so it seems to be with concentration.  To really look at life, we need to narrow our gaze steadily until things come into focus, to be prepared to look at things from a whole different perspective.  Upside down and backwards.

Here’s a secret that I discovered about meditation, from Ayya Khema via Leigh Brasington.  One-pointedness will not only result in better concentration, but if the “pinhole” is small enough, one may enter the first jhana.  This state includes a kind of physical and mental rapture or pīti. The fact that our body gives us this pleasing sensation in exchange for finally centering our mind is proof enough that there is much to be gained by making our attention a steady lens on one particular thing.  Such are the rewards of focusing.  When I first encountered pīti, I described it as the tingling sensation after sneezing – but stronger.  Others have compared it to a runner’s high.

The purpose of the first jhana is not the bliss, though. Bliss is just the carrot. The purpose is to focus and steady the mind in preparation for insight, to eventually understand one’s own mind, to glimpse… nirvana.  There is a whole series of jhanas, which become more abstract, but knowing about the first one is enough to realize that any serenity project must begin with steering the mind to single-pointedness.  And if you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know that your mind doesn’t think that you are its master.  It’s hard.  How do we have any hope of avoiding the aggressive distractions of Capitalism 2.0 when we can’t even limit the distractions manufactured by our own minds?

My point is not that everyone needs to meditate.  But everyone does need a point from which to focus on their lives.  Euclid started his Elements with the definition of a point:  “that which has no part,” something without width, length, or breadth, but with an indivisible location.

When Spinoza (you didn’t think you would escape without a dose of Spinoza, did you?) constructed his philosophical system (based on the methodology of Euclid), he reasoned that he first had to find:

…some real good having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else; whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme and unending happiness.

Perhaps, almost anything we can concentrate on “singly” can be the start to Spinoza’s extravagant goals. If we are trying to make sense of life, come to terms with life, live with serenity – we need to identify a single point on which to build our understanding.  Though not easy, it is worthy of trial and consideration.  As Spinoza says at the end of his Ethics, “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”

By the way, if you go to Dumphries for the camera obscura or any of a number of other good reasons, eat at Bruno’s.  You will not be disappointed.

You might also look at my short story “Nothing New” for an alternative way to help limit distractions and narrow the aperture into the mind.