Listening; Still Learning

 

I read recently that The Dalai Lama says the best thing one can do to improve the world, even if you can’t do anything else, is to listen. In the last year or so I have also being trying to live more in line with the dictum ‘you have two ears and one mouth so listen twice as much as you talk’ but it’s hard. Especially as you get older.

What I never understood is that if you are halfway intelligent and live 50 years or more you are likely to have learned quite a bit. You have taken in and processed vast amounts of information, seen countless movies, read hundreds of books and articles, participated in probably thousands of conversations, and simply observed people for half a century or more. You see patterns repeated; you’ve seen what works in situations, and what doesn’t. You have been mulling things over for at least 50 years, and ipso facto, you probably know more about life and human behaviours that someone who is 30 years old because you simply have much more data to base your conclusions on – more conversations, more perspectives, more concerts, more songs, more travelling, more heartaches. So you feel that you know more than people much younger than yourself. And you want to share what you know with them. But in one of life’s strange twists of irony, no one really wants to know, especially those much younger than yourself, for they are busy discovering their own path and realisations about the world. And so they must.

But what does the halfway intelligent older person then do with all this insight? Just listen???? Just learn some more??? Apparently so according to The Dalai Lama.

Something else happens the longer you live: your standards creep imperceptibly higher. If you’ve heard 10 songs, watched 10 plays and 10 movies the chances of you coming across another song, play or movie that is better than these 10 is very high. If you have heard 1000 songs, seen a 1000 plays and movies, those chances are much smaller. Through long term exposure to many fields of human endeavour you develop a keen awareness of what constitutes excellence – quality of life, of relationships, of artefacts of entertainment, of a sunset, of a view, and in a very real sense you become spoiled. You have recognised magnificence in life – of architecture, of art, of writing - and learned that it is rare. So I can go along and listen to a band and I will enjoy it, but I can’t help but subconsciously compare it with the music I have heard in years gone by and it is way less likely, though not impossible, to be as enjoyable as music heard at concerts in the past because my standards have crept up. I am now harder to please. It is harder to be moved by music, by the spoken word, by a spectacular view – because you have already experienced true magnificence in these aspects of life, and know how unlikely it is that you will experience better.

 I guess one of the keys to a successful older life is, despite all the wonderful things you may have enjoyed in the past, to treat every day and every new experience as if it could be as good as anything you’ve ever enjoyed. To go into each new moment unfettered by expectations based on past experiences. And listen 😊

Aging and Sadness

 

I’ve been looking at old photographs and have been quite moved by the fact that everyone looks so much younger – my wife and I, our children, friends, even our parents – everyone! Everyone looks so beautifully youthful. And there’s a tinge of sadness as I contemplate all the years that have passed and I’m trying to work out why.

It’s not as if those years have been filled with tragedy – quite the opposite in fact. There have been sad times but overall life for me has been full of joy and wonder. So the sadness is not rooted in any disappointment about the past. It seems to revolve squarely around the fact that

I am not young anymore.

Why is there inherent sadness in this fact? I am not sick, or about to die. In all likelihood I have many years of health left to enjoy the time ahead. But I have less time than I used to. Is that it? That I can longer pretend that the end is far off in a distant future?

Is the quality of ‘young’ intrinsically better than oldness? Is it somehow better to look young and youthful than it is to look old and a little weathered? And if so, why? Looking older of course is a constant reminder that you’re time is limited, or that you have been around for many years. There’s a sense of loss in there – a loss of a feeling of invincibility; loss of that feeling that there is lots of time left to enjoy people and places.

One could see this as positive – I enjoy my life. I have no reason to want it to end. I want it to go on for as long as possible. I could count my blessings. (I do.) But still the sadness of aging lingers. Is it because I don’t look young? That I feel a little irrelevant to the generation before me? That I am adjudged to be in some sense passed it?

You do however sometimes hear people my age talk about the advantages of being over 60. And I totally subscribe to this. There is something really pleasurable about knowing who you are; knowing what you think; having fewer doubts; knowing that you can express opinions better than ever before. And maybe even that you think more clearly than you ever did. But would I rather be younger with the accompanying angst that comes with it? Probably. Why? Because that would mean I had more time.

So it’s the shorter timeframe thing again. I look back on those photographs and am reminded that I probably won’t have another 30 years of memories. But who can tell? I may well. There may be decades of memories left to create and in 30 years I could be looking back at photos I took today. And what – feeling even sadder because I’ll be even older?

And in the background Gordon Lightfoot coincidentally sings:

It’s cold on the shoulder; and you know that we get a little older every day!

When I was 23 I returned home from 14 months travelling overseas. A family aunt asked my on my return, “Apart from feeling a little wiser and a little sadder, how was your journey?” I asked why she assumed I would be sadder and she said no one ever came home from that kind of journey without being sadder. In her view it was as if having such an out of the ordinary experience was ipso facto  going to result in a degree of sadness. In time I came to agree with her.

Over the years I have learned too that sadness is quite a precious emotional state and is closely related to a sense of beauty and appreciating the things we care about. So I’m not disheartened by the idea of being sad when looking at my past, or because I’m so much older now. I think there is a sadness attached to growing older but it doesn’t have to be debilitating. I’m just trying to disentangle the roots of that sadness. But in the meantime, as Don Henley and Merle Haggard sang:

Wear it like a royal crown when you get old and grey.
It’s the cost of living, and everyone pays.