Preparation for a Wise Old Age

There are two kinds of problems in life.  One kind requires the question, What are we going to do about it?  The other calls for different questions: What does it mean?  How does one relate to it?  T.S. Eliot

If we view life as a pilgrimage, then we will realize that preparation for being old is a major task of our younger years.  In our culture we emphasize the material side of this preparation with our never-ending emphasis on retirement investments and programs.  But just as living fully meaningful lives before we are old is not simply about material success—it’s difficult to live a rich life without a measure of material well-being, but it’s also difficult to live such a life if that’s all you have—the same is true when we are old.  As I described in yesterday’s blog, countless old people in our culture today are well off financially but live in spiritually barren landscapes of meaninglessness.

Pilgrimage is a three-step process:  preparation, the event(s) themselves, and comprehending.  If we wish our time of aging to be truly meaningful, we need to prepare, and besides our material preparation, we must build our spiritual treasure chests.  That clearly means doing our spiritual push-ups, the practices every religious tradition teaches—meditation and prayer, forgiveness and humility, emptying and openness, and so on.

I would add gratitude to the list of the obvious, but often difficult, spiritual practices that are prerequisite for wise old age.  We too often think of gratitude as a simple response to a gift—a simple “thank you” is all it takes.  That would be a good start, but it’s complicated.  Insincere thanks can be worse than no comment, so at the very least the requisite attitude and emotion must be present.

Even more important is scope—for what should we be thankful?  If you think about it, you will find it difficult to think of much in our lives that is not a gift—from our very lives to our language and culture to our identities to nearly every material aspect that sustains us.  However, if you live in a culture that emphasizes independence and downplays dramatically our interconnectedness with others, to be truly grateful for our countless blessings tends to be viewed as a peculiar kind of weakness, an admission that we are not in charge, that most of what we are and have is a gift from others—from nature, from those who preceded us, from countless and mainly unknown fellow humans today.

A striking feature of American life today is how odd it is that so many people are unhappy and depressed.  Yes, we have great economic disparities that should be rectified, and yes, many people have real poverty and many hardships; but we also have more than virtually everyone who preceded us, or who is alive today. If we lived in full awareness of our comforts and privileges we would be on our knees giving thanks and daily celebrating exuberantly our blessings.

Viewing ourselves as the center of the universe produces a profound disconnect that is almost guaranteed to render us unhappy, because our interconnectedness and interdependencies are fundamental to all we experience and are.  Ingratitude is never fun to meet, but it is especially off-putting in the old, for surely a sign that an old person has some wisdom is the extent and depth of their gratitude.  Lacking gratitude thus helps to trigger the cycle of isolation-unhappiness-anger-ingratitude-loneliness that, as we discussed yesterday, leads to increasing bitterness.

I believe gratitude, in fact, is the wellspring of religion itself.  If you are paying attention you cannot help but gain a growing recognition of the gifts that shower our lives from every quarter, and without a God or Gods to thank, we experience a deep frustration at a basic impulse upon which we cannot act.  Gratitude and praise are built into the core of our existence.  They are the fundamental attitude and rituals that connect us to the sources of our selves and life.   If we wish reach a wise old age, then, we must practice gratitude and praise.

[Contributed by Bob Sessions]