Theme One: Identity

Read before this session:
● “The Oven Bird,” Robert Frost
● “The Diminished Thing,” Ursula K. Le Guin

Reflect before this session:
● What are the various ways you have identified yourself over
the years? Have you identified with a family role or a certain
vocation? Come prepared to share some identity words that
describe you, independent of family and work.

The Oven Bird
Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The Diminished Thing (Ursula K. Le Guin)
Not wanting to know much about getting old (I don’t mean older, I
mean old: late seventies, eighties, beyond) is probably a human
survival characteristic. What’s the use of knowing anything about
it ahead of time? You’ll find out enough when you get there.

One of the things people often find when they get there is that
younger people don’t want to hear about it. So honest
conversation concerning geezerhood takes place mostly among
geezers.

And when younger people tell old people what old age is, the
geezers may not agree but seldom argue.

I want to argue, just a little.

Robert Frost’s ovenbird asked the operative question: “What to
make of a diminished thing?”

Americans believe strongly in positive thinking. Positive thinking is
great. It works best when based on a realistic assessment and
acceptance of the actual situation. Positive thinking founded on
denial may not be so great.

Everybody who gets old has to assess their ever-changing but
seldom improving situation and make of it what they can. I think
most old people accept the fact that they’re old—I’ve never heard
anybody over eighty say “I’m not old.” And they make the best of
it. As the saying goes, consider the alternative!

A lot of younger people, seeing the reality of old age as entirely
negative, see acceptance of age as negative. Wanting to deal
with old people in a positive spirit, they’re led to deny old people
their reality.

With all good intentions, people say to me, “Oh, you’re not old!”
And the pope isn’t Catholic.

“You’re only as old as you think you are!”

Now, you don’t honestly think having lived eighty-three years is a
matter of opinion.

“My uncle’s ninety and he walks eight miles a day.”

Lucky Unk. I hope he never meets that old bully Arthur Ritis or his
mean wife Sciatica.

“My grandmother lives all by herself and she’s still driving her car
at ninety-nine!”

Well, hey for Granny, she’s got good genes. She’s a great
example—but not one most people are able to imitate.

Old age isn’t a state of mind. It’s an existential situation.
Would you say to a person paralyzed from the waist down, “Oh,
you aren’t a cripple! You’re only as paralyzed as you think you
are! My cousin broke her back once but she got right over it and
now she’s in training for the marathon!”

Encouragement by denial, however well-meaning, backfires. Fear
is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up,
anyhow? Is it really the geezer?

To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase
my age, you erase my life—me.

Of course that’s what a lot of really young people inevitably do.
Kids who haven’t lived with geezers don’t know what they are. So
it is that old men come to learn the invisibility women learned
twenty or thirty years earlier. The kids on the street don’t see you.

If they have to see you, it’s often with the indifference, distrust, or
animosity animals feel for animals of a different species.

Animals have instinctive codes of etiquette for avoiding or
defusing this mindless fear and hostility. Dogs ceremonially smell
each other’s anuses, cats ceremonially yowl on the territorial
borderline. Human societies provide us with various more
elaborate devices. One of the most effective is respect. You don’t
like the stranger, but your carefully respectful behavior to him
elicits the same from him, thus avoiding the sterile expense of
time and blood on aggression and defense.

In less change-oriented societies than ours, a great part of the
culture’s useful information, including the rules of behavior, is
taught by the elders to the young. One of those rules is,
unsurprisingly, a tradition of respect for age.

In our increasingly unstable, future-oriented, technology-driven
society, the young are often the ones who show the way, who
teach their elders what to do. So who respects whom for what?
The geezers are damned if they’re going to kowtow to the
twerps—and vice versa.

When there’s no social pressure behind it, respectful behavior
becomes a decision, an individual choice. Americans, even when
they pay pious lip service to Judeo-Christian rules of moral
behavior, tend to regard moral behavior as a personal decision,
above rules, and often above laws.

This is morally problematic when personal decision is confused
with personal opinion. A decision worthy of the name is based on
observation, factual information, intellectual and ethical judgment.
Opinion—that darling of the press, the politician, and the
poll—may be based on no information at all. At worst, unchecked
by either judgment or moral tradition, personal opinion may reflect
nothing but ignorance, jealousy, and fear.

So if I “decide”—if my opinion is—that living a long time just
means getting ugly, weak, useless, and in the way, I waste no
respect on old people, just as if my opinion is that all young
people are scary, insolent, unreliable, and unteachable, I waste
no respect on them.

Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally
misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must
respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with
judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others,
by repressing aggression and requiring self-control, makes room
for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and
affection can grow.

Opinion all too often leaves no room for anything but itself.

People whose society doesn’t teach them respect for childhood
are lucky if they learn to understand, or value, or even like their
own children. Children who aren’t taught respect for old age are
 likely to fear it, and to discover understanding and affection for old
people only by luck, by chance.

I think the tradition of respecting age in itself has some
justification. Just coping with daily life, doing stuff that was always
so easy you didn’t notice it, gets harder in old age, till it may take
real courage to do it at all. Old age generally involves pain and
danger and inevitably ends in death. The acceptance of that takes
courage. Courage deserves respect.

So much for respect. Back to the diminished thing.
Childhood is when you keep gaining, old age is when you keep
losing. The Golden Years the PR people keep gloating at us
about are golden because that’s the color of the light at sunset.

Of course diminishment isn’t all there is to aging. Far from it. Life
out of the rat race, but still in the comfort zone, can give the
chance to be in the moment, and bring real peace of mind.

If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor,
an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of
understanding. It’s had more time to gather knowledge and more
practice in comparison and judgment. No matter if the knowledge
is intellectual or practical or emotional, if it concerns alpine
ecosystems or the Buddha nature or how to reassure a frightened
child: when you meet an old person with that kind of knowledge, if
you have the sense of a bean sprout you know you’re in a rare
and irreproducible presence.