It’s how you are old
There is much that the elderly can teach us, if we’d only listen.
LONG after my grandfather retired as an engineer, he would keep his mind sharp by reading and his body fit by walking his dog three times every day.
Whenever I visit him, I remember being impressed but also confused by the efforts he put into being active. At his age (he was in his 70s at that point), he surely should be resting and enjoying life at a more leisurely pace. Or so I thought, in my naivety.
One day, I asked him why he walked for miles each day, and why he always seemed to have a book at hand. He told me: “I do it for two reasons. First, I’m not dead yet. I’ll enjoy moving around for as long as I can. I’ve never been one to take my health for granted.
“Secondly, regardless of whatever age you get to be, there’s always something new to learn. If you pay close enough attention, you can gain something from everyone; and, if you read a lot, it keeps your mind sharp.”
I always admired my grandfather’s attitude, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. In my teens, I thought of old age as the time when you start to wind down, but my grandfather showed me that age really is just a state of mind.
Now, having the privilege of being in touch with elderly people through this column, I have a much deeper appreciation of what it means to be old. Elderly people never lose their value – if anything, it grows. It’s just that younger people stop paying attention.
The French author Jules Renard wrote: “It’s not how old you are, it’s how you are old.”
I think this describes old age perfectly, and through the fortune of having listened to so many stories from elderly people, I’m convinced that how you travel along the road determines how you’ll be when you reach the destination of old age.
When I think of how much stress there is in younger people now (my age and under), I don’t think that it’s our environment or technology, our parents or the demands and uncertainty we face that causes problems. The world has always been changing apace – there’s never been a time of assured security or certainty. Anxiety, stress, depression all of that has been felt and lived by countless generations past.
Instead, I think the root of the problem is how we react to adverse circumstances.
We all know people who, no matter what comes their way, seem to take even the toughest times in their stride, meeting them with patient endurance.
Conversely, we all know people who can experience the slightest of setbacks and react as though their world has caved in around them.
How we talk to ourselves is, in my opinion, greatly underrated in terms of how we view and interact with the world. When my grandfather talked about The Great Depression era, he said he was thankful for the times he got work, and that the community worked together and supported those out of work knowing that the roles would reverse soon enough.
He could have focused on the economic devastation, the fact that he – as a skilled engineer – would sometimes need to take on work that he could’ve seen as “beneath” him. Instead, he was able to accept the situation as it was and, rather than dwelled on how unfair life can be, looked for ways to do his best to support his family and friends in a collective time of need.
Perhaps that kind of patient endurance is what’s lacking in some of us today. My generation was taught the importance of getting good grades, making valuable connections and realising that we could be anything we decided to become.
We had fewer lessons on being patient, paying our dues and how to accept our situation when life isn’t panning out quite as we’d expected. Unsurprisingly, it can lead to a great deal of dissatisfaction or discontent.
Instead of being grateful for receiving an education, we lament not having gone to a better school. Rather than being thankful for the chance to work in reasonably stable conditions, we complain about our career not being where it “should be”. When we drive to meetings, people have better cars than we do and yet, many people have to cycle or walk to wherever they need to go.
One of the many reasons I value listening to the elderly is because their stories tend to ground me and serve as a reminder to be grateful for all that I have now – which is truly an abundance of blessings.
The best of the old people are insightful because they’ve lived through all the same hopes, dreams, ambitions, anxieties and fears that life gifts us all. The environment, times and technologies might change, but our human nature largely remains the same.
In dealing with my own moments of panic and feelings of inadequacy when thinking about the bigger picture, I always bring to mind one of the greatest pieces of advice I’ve ever read. It comes from the late, great Quentin Crisp who said: “Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.”