August 13, 2019
My dear grandkids,
I want to share an observation with all of my grandchildren about aging. A seven year old child is considered perfectly developed. She is right where she belongs at seven. The beauty. The body. The brain. She compares not at all to the twenty-five year old. The beauty, the body, the brain are different. All three more developed. Another stage of perfection. At fifty years of age, the beauty is different, but still present. The body is not as firm, but it can still resemble the body of a twenty-five year old. And the brain – beautifully developed if it has been exercised. At the age of eighty-five, all perceptions change. No longer do we say that the beauty is perfect and that the body is exactly what it should be. That it is as perfect as a seven year olds. And the brain, why if it has been exercised, and its cells are still sharp, might be at its maximum. It is loaded with experience. It mixes experience with facts into a grayness that centuries of generations have called wisdom. But our culture misses a lot of that and we focus on the physical tools used to connect thought with expression. The pauses and the stammers are emphasized, and the thoughts are deemphasized because our culture focuses on the delivery system. While a still unformed human of the age of seven is called perfect; a physically declining human of the age of eighty-five, or seventy-five, or even sixty-five is considered imperfect, perhaps even broken. And, given these perceptions, this is how we treat this version of a human. And wisdom is lost. So this is my announcement. Your life has one of two outcomes. Either you will die early of accident, disease, or mistreatment of your body or you will become older, and then old. In time, and inevitably, your body will no longer accomplish sufficient bodily functions and its time to house your soul will be over. A person is in fact as perfect at eighty-five, for that stage of life, as he is at seven. But we don’t necessarily treat these older versions of ourselves as if they were perfect. The younger ones want to think for them, complete their sentences, define certain rules of life for them, and most importantly, decide what is good for them without, in too many cases, asking them what they want. You might not behave that way if you appreciated that they are perfect, as you will be perfect, if you are fortunate enough to live this stage of human life. If you look at your older friends as perfect you will see them differently, and you will behave differently. And you will enjoy them more. My thinking here was deeply stimulated by Atul Gawande’s book “Being Mortal” which is about aging, and dying. Everyone I know who has read this book has been changed by it. If you are still reading, may I offer one final thought. Leave aside political views for a moment and, within the context of this note, just think about how Joe Biden is being treated by the press and the talking heads. The focus is on his physical delivery. He stammers. He loses a word here and there. He misspeaks and has to correct himself. But it is only his thoughts that are important, very wise for some, and perhaps incorrect for others. The delivery imperfections are those of a perfectly aging human of the age of 76. Once before during my lifetime, before our culture got upside down, we faced this issue with an older President, and I mean Eisenhower, not Reagan. Ike seemed old. Ike couldn’t deliver a speech. But when almost every one of his advisors recommended on two occasions that he use “the bomb” in battle – at the end of the Korean War and also during a dispute with China over the Quemoy and Matus islands in 1958 – Ike pulled off a Dr. Phil – “what the hell are your guys thinking.” (“Ike’s Bluff”, Evan Thomas.) Wisdom saved us. Many imperfect beauties, and imperfect bodies are loaded with perfect wisdom.
