Jeff Matlow/By Title Only had a great newsletter this week. It not only presents a perspective but gives you a few tools to use moving forward. Enjoy hunkering down for a few minutes to think about how you handle some of these issues. Hope your 4th was safe and you are wearing a hat in this summer sun. Be well. Summer Hug!
We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow old at all is a tremendous privilege — one withheld from the vast majority of humans populating the history of our young species (to say nothing of the infinite potential humans who never chanced into existing).
“For old people,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her sublime meditation on aging and what beauty really means, “beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young… It has to do with who the person is.” Another way to say this, to feel it, is that to become a person worthy of old age is the triumph of life. Henry Miller, in his reflection upon turning eighty, located the triumph in remaining able to “fall in love again and again… forgive as well as forget… keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical.” Grace Paley instructed in what remains the finest advice on the art of growing older: “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”
Life is largely a matter of how we hold ourselves — our hearts, our fears, our forgivenesses — along the procession of the years. Hardly anyone has furnished a more elegant and robust banister for the holding than Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) in her 1970 book La vieillesse, published in England as Old Age and in America as the characteristically cottoned The Coming of Age.
Two years before she came to consider how chance and choice converge to make us who we are. De Beauvoir observes that contemporary Western culture winces at old age as a “semi-death.” With an eye to the biological privilege of getting to grow old, she writes:
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.
Vacation won’t make things better. Changing jobs won’t make things better. Getting the recognition you deserve won’t make things better. Drugs won’t make things better.
The only thing that will make things better is your relationship with yourself.
For some of us, tech provides an ever-evolving banquet table of opportunity. For others – it’s an ever-evolving invitation to destroy the fabric of our nation and our lives.
Clearly, we are not educated to vet what is coming into our laps daily.
Clearly, we are a gullible society influenced by high emotion coupled with information taken out of context and amplified.
Clearly, the above combination doesn’t bode well for making sane decisions.
Stephen Hawking said: “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”
By the way, I highly recommend Daily Pnut. I like the way the site structures the top news stories along with providing links for deeper dives into topics of interest. It is one of several newsletters published by Tim Hsia. Tim is a graduate of West Point, and was deployed twice to Iraq. After leaving active duty, Tim graduated from Stanford University’s JD/MBA program. He is also the co-founder of Service to School, a nonprofit for veteran higher education programs.
I found Dore’s article (below) on learning to wait – interesting.
The mental gymnastics involved in “waiting” can be intense. Those times when you vulnerably wait for good or bad news. Sometimes you are handed a reprieve and then you wait for something else – and so it goes.
Frankly, I am not as good at waiting as I used to be: I was quite patient – even philosophical – and the patience served me well.
Now?
Let’s just say “buck up” is one of my current mantras.
So dear readers – do buck up and enjoy your Sunday!
