Tag: experience

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  As Philip Larkin said in a poem of his own old age, left unpublished at his death: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.”

 

 

 

 

Teach Your Children Well?

Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams,
The one they pick’s the one you’ll know by.

Anyone who has been a parent (or a grandparent or an aunt or uncle) knows how hard it is to “teach our children well,” how frustrating it is to helplessly watch young people make the same mistakes we made. There is a memorable passage from Willa Cather’s One of Ours in which an older man tries to warn the young Claude against a bad marriage:

He found himself absolutely unable to touch upon the vast body of experience he wished to communicate to Claude. It lay in his chest like a physical misery, and the desire to speak struggled there. But he had no words, no way to make himself understood. He had no argument to present. What he wanted to do was to hold up life as he had found it, like a picture, to his young friend; to warn him, without explanation, against certain heart-breaking disappointments. It could not be done, he saw. The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. The only way that Claude could ever come to share his secret, was to live.

“The only way …was to live.” That is the answer we come to, isn’t it? The only teacher is experience, and yet we wish we could prevent their mistakes, their heartbreak. And Claude does end up broken-hearted.

Of course, these days, we often find ourselves learning from the young. Technology is the best example; we are forever having our computers and digital televisions fixed or explained by someone far younger. I don’t mind; they know the language and I am grateful to have a translator. Sometimes I wonder, though, whether our technical and cultural laggedness does not make young people assume we have nothing to share. Because on issues of the uses of youth, on the dangers of dayspring mishandled, I do so wish I could spare them “heart-breaking disappointments.”

There were other eras when the youth held knowledge the old did not have. As education and literacy started to spread in 18th century England, younger members of the household – the children and grandchildren – could read the new broadsides and chapbooks that their elders could not decipher. Families often gathered by the fire to be read to by the young. At the same time, increasing literacy and the proliferation of books meant that the memory of the elders was not as important as it had been. One could get an almanac with planting times, rather than relying on Grandpa’s experience.

So, in the face of all that, what do we have to teach? Of course, the old person has always served as a memento mori for the young – a living reminder of how (unless science comes up with a cure for aging and death) they will end up, given time. Time. The fourth dimension. We have gained experience over time, and have lived long enough to know how it is when passion is spent, the consequences of decisions (or the failure to make decisions), what is harvested after a long and punishing season of plowing and planting. As we are running out of time, it is time we want to give the young experience of, but it is not easy. Where I feel this lack most is in environmental issues; our generation participated in enjoying the resources of this world without taking account of what would happen over time. Now we know and weep. But more on the old and the environment in another post. And I might note that while we are interested in teaching the young about the consequences of time, they are interested in how it feels to live without time.

This week we have all been learning from the young students from Parkland as they march on Washington, believe changes can be made, refuse to be taught acceptance or pessimism, and insist on grasping the present moment. Bless them. They have learned from us, but not as elders – they have learned from our younger selves, our actions in the sixties and early seventies when we marched against the Vietnam War, rallied against segregation, burned our bras, and didn’t trust anyone over thirty. And they have much to teach us about remembering.

Graham Nash finishes his song by admonishing the young to “teach their parents well”:

And you, of tender years,
Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by,
And so please help them with your youth,
They seek the truth before they can die.
Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell will slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they pick’s, the one you’ll know by.

This week’s story, “Any Help She Can Get” gives us a younger person whose desperation forces her to learn from the very old and the very young. May we all be open to the wisdom of age and the vitality of youth.