Tag: time

Slowness in Old Age – Perhaps a Gentle Blessing?

I have always been interested in the concept of time, at once fascinated with it and threatened by it.  Back in graduate school, I wrote essays about the depiction of time in literature from different time periods.  For example, in The Canterbury Tales we find multiple ways of telling time.  The new technology (mechanical clocks) was so recent that it had not had time, as yet, to eradicate prior knowledge (unlike our current era, when many children growing up in the digital age cannot tell time on an analogue clock).  In one short passage, Chaucer refers to the time in at least four different ways: as a portion of the “artificial day”, by the length of the shadows, by the degrees of inclination of the sun, and by the hour of the “clokke.”  The clock in this case was probably read by ear, by the chimes, and emanated often from the local monastery, reminding all that all time was God’s time.  It is of note that early Christians did not believe in usury because, among other reasons, it involved making money through time and time belonged to God.

By Jonathan Swift’s era, however, usury was accepted, and time was dominated by mechanical devices.  Not only did clocks have faces and more exact calibration, but they were even carried in one’s pocket, something which puzzled the Lilliputians when they encountered Gulliver:

He [Gulliver] put this engine [pocket watch] into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.

I was always a creature of the clock.  When I was a working mother with two children, I had no choice.  Every moment was scheduled.  I was good at it, and it became a habit.  What I am apparently not so good at is slowing down.  There is a quote that is making the rounds these days from the Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe: “The times are urgent; let us slow down.”  He also said that “The idea of slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions.”  Akomolafe is talking about global humanitarian issues like climate change and refugee displacement, but slowness is also, it seems to me, necessary to navigate old age.  First of all, we are no longer built for speed.  Almost every fall that my mother took in the latter part of her life happened when she was rushing to answer a phone, tending to a barking dog, or some such non-emergency.  Secondly, haste makes waste.  We don’t have the energy or money to cope with larger mistakes.  Lastly, we are approaching the end.  It is time to put on the brakes and look around us before we become stardust again.

All of this makes sense, but – nevertheless – old habits and values don’t change easily.  For a simple example, I find myself frustrated with fast pieces on the piano.  I can play them, but not at accepted tempo, not fast enough.  I am just playing for myself (and my husband who, locked in his study, is an involuntary audience).  Would I rather play the piece well but very slowly or fast with mistakes and frustrations? Slow practice has always been recommended. “If you practice something slowly, you forget it slowly. If you practice something fast, you forget it fast,” advised Itzhak Perlman.  And then there is this from Saint-Saens: “One must practice slowly, then more slowly, and finally slowly.”  Since all the piano playing I do could be labeled as “practice,” slow is fine with me and enables me to play pieces that would ordinarily be beyond me.  It is a trick, however, to go slowly and keep an even tempo; this is true both on the piano and in life, I think.

The same is true for reading and writing.  There is this from an interview with one of my favorite writers, Lewis Mumford, which took place when he was in his eighties and still producing books:

The really annoying part of the aging process is not what happens externally—one has plenty of time to get prepared for that—but what happens internally,” he says. “One knows one isn’t quite as good. One’s energies are lower. When I was writing my major books, I would do between 3,000 and 4,000 words in the morning, between 8 and 11:30. Now I’m very happy to do 1,500 or 2,000 words.

“Now I’m very happy to ….”  There is an acceptance of reality in Mumford that is graceful and wise.  And the thought that goes into that smaller word count may make for better prose than the facile writing of our youth.  Early readers (before the 17th century) spoke words aloud as they read.  Until recently writers used pen and paper to write and revised with cross-outs and clipped-on inserts.  These practices were slower, but surely made for better understanding.

Slowness is in the air.  We are now being told that slow learning is better than fast; slow thought is a necessary balance to fast intuitive thinking.  And, of course, slow food is better than fast food. One of my children recently told me that he couldn’t imagine spending the time we spend on food shopping, planning, preparation and clean-up.  I could have argued that, once you have a personal catalogue of recipes and experience in preparing them, it does not take that much more time than driving to a restaurant, waiting for your server, etc.  But the real answer is that preparing food is a worthwhile activity in itself – and what would you be doing if you weren’t slicing vegetables for tonight’s stew?  I could go on and on, but talking to younger people almost never convinces them, and I have better things to do.

“Quickening” is the term we use for the very first detectible movement of a fetus in its mother’s womb.  It is a big moment for pregnant mothers and marks the first independent action of a new life.  If the beginning of life is “quickening,” maybe we need an equivalent “slowening” for the last part of life. And perhaps, by accepting our slowness, by appreciating it, we are accepting one of the greatest gifts of old age.

If you are interested in the development of timekeeping, Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization is highly recommended, although I believe it is out of print.  Anything by Mumford is highly recommended.  I have also posted here my old essay on the depiction of time in The Canterbury Tales.

And lastly, I just read this morning’s New York Times Magazine, where there is an article on the peace and joy of slow driving.  I am already a right lane person.

Money, Time, and Old Folks

Covid has turned the world upside-down in some strange ways in relation to age, time, and money.  Let’s start with the money.  We old folks – with our social security, pensions, savings, and Medicare – are perhaps a little better off than some.  We don’t have jobs to lose, children to feed, college loans to pay off.  We are in appreciably more danger in other ways than the  younger folks (see earlier post), but we are arguably a little more economically secure for the time being.

In relation to money, old folks have a long history of being classified as covetous, miserly.  Going back to Horace (Ars Poetica), the old man is described by his “desire for gain, miserliness, lack of energy, greediness for a longer life, quarrelsomeness, praise of good old days when he was a boy, and his condemnation of the younger generation.”  Famous examples of old misers might include the fictional characters Ebenezer Scrooge and Silas Marner.

Of course, in times when there was no provision for the elderly except perhaps the good will of one’s children (remember King Lear?), it made sense for old people to hang onto their money.  Neither do the old have the time or energy to start again.  When Benjamin Franklin admonishes a “Young Tradesmen” to “[r]emember that time is money,” one can only wonder if the implication is that the old – with little time left – are poor by definition?

Incidentally, time and money are intimately related – as was most apparent in the early Christian church’s opposition to usury. One of the Christian arguments against usury was that all time is God’s time, and that charging interest is profiting from something that belongs to God.  For many years, the term has been used only for the crime of charging exorbitant interest, but there was as time in the Christian church when no interest at all was allowed, when belief in usury was a heresy.  But where would the modern economy be without usury?

Similarly, using probability tables to predict life expectancy for annuity and insurance purposes assumed that someone was betting on one’s death, and that someone (other than God) was sure enough of when our “number would be up” to put money on it.  When life insurance came into being in the 18th century, there were many who thought that it also was a heresy, a presumption.  Only God could know when our time was up.

Here is the paradox: We older people have time, and yet we are running out of time.  Retired and quarantined, we have oodles of hours on our hands when we might not be able to count on years, or even months.  It is a strange situation.  One might consider Wendell Berry’s view that “time is neither young nor old”:

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young nor old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse.

As we watch some young people flaunting the quarantine rules and endangering the lives around them, our lives, it seems that perhaps they think they have plenty of time.   They do not think that Covid will kill them (and statistically they are correct), and they do not think about dying much at all.  Neither did I at their age.  And yet, the elders – who are busy trying to make peace with the nearing end – see the possibility that the “truce of old age” (St. Benedict) will soon be broken, our lives will be precipitated into immediate danger.  Usually, as in war time, it is the young who are in danger, fighting for the elders and others at home.  This time we are the potential casualties.  It is a topsy-turvy world.

For more perspective on how Covid is exposing (and creating) stress between the old and young, see my post, Covid-19 and the Generational Wars. This situation is taking on a new dimension as we begin to open the schools.  Children and young adults seem to be at low risk, but how about older teachers, custodians, librarians, and bus drivers?  For a fictional take on the generational gap, you might try “Common Enemy.”

 

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.