I heard of someone the other day who was told off for talking too much about her age. She is 73. Robustly she defended her right to share with other people the sort of experiences which we have tried to identify in these postings. ‘This is important to me’, she said, ‘so I want to talk about it’. And so she should. I agree with her, though I recognise the dangers. If confession is good for the soul, expression can be helpful to the mind. Just talking to the mirror is no fun. There’s so much that’s new about these latter years of life. To keep it all bottled up can make what is otherwise odd into something that seems disturbingly bad. We can’t demand it, but we do need an audience sometimes.
I suppose you have to wait for the right moment and the right person. Younger people have limited patience with the elderly. For them they can be the people who hold up the bus queue, try to make friends with little children, can’t find the change to pay at the checkout and start speaking sentences they can’t finish.
Speed is everything today. Older people are slow!
The middle-aged are working so hard at not being old that they don’t want to be reminded of the horizons that await them. When I was still one of them, I used to hear my mother say again and again that she wished she was dead. We all tried to reassure her that we wanted her to live, forgetting that she actually needed to say these things to us. This was her story. Frail herself and now a widow, she no longer had the appetite for life. We should have allowed her to tell us so.
In fact those of us who are getting on carry an experience that might be of value to everyone if more people would allow us to share it. We are guardians of a dimension of life into which most people one day will enter. We have frustrations and fears and we are inclined to moan a lot, but there’s a resilience and courage and even serenity about us that we would like to express as well.
It has been hard to come by, this knowledge we have had to learn, and we shouldn’t keep it to ourselves.
…so, please, may we talk the talk? It could be of benefit to others as well as to ourselves.
B.R.
Hello Bryan. I really identify with what you are saying here. I do feel that one of the difficulties of being «old» these days is that the whole notion of «wisdom» has disappeared from modern times. I feel that years ago, elder people commanded a respect and were cherished because they could teach younger generations so much. I know that times move faster now, and some of us struggle to keep up with the modern world simply because it moves so quickly! But we still have messages to pass on. So listen to us folks!
Cheers Bryan and thanks for your Blog. We enjoy reading and sharing your thoughts.
Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts and experience. I have just been reading a thesis on how ministers/priests handle retirement and came across a new word – ‘sageism’. I don’t claim any right to be a sage, but as you say we do have knowledge to share and would often like at least to be heard.Good wishes.
B.R.