Cows, Kinney Road

   I was never all that good at being young, and I think I have a shot at getting older well. Like everything else worth doing, getting older is a challenge, and the bigotry, cultural repression and hoary marketing ethics of  our society do not offer much help.
  There are no expectations for people getting older, really. They are supposed to stop working, stop loving, downsize their lives, step up preventive and medical testing, get supplemental health insurance, assuming they can afford any, and start saving for assisted care, so as not to burden their loved ones.
  For me – this is a very personal thing – the very idea of retirement is part of the complex societal pressure in this country that conspires to make  people feel useless, irrelevant, vulnerable and out of the mainstream of life. A life of leisure is a perfectly valid choice for anyone who wants it. I don’t.
   Conservatives and liberals dominate the talk shows, but the most powerful ideology in America is marketing, not politics. Younger people are prized because they have years of spending ahead of them. Older people are not because they don’t. Thus this visceral bias creeps into movies, TV, many books and blogs. Who wants to reach 65 year olds on Social Security? They aren’t buying homes or furniture or HDTV’s. Apart from the AARP, they begin slipping out of sight of much of American culture and the economy. They are supposed to shut up and go away.
  This is insane, a horrible waste. Not only do younger people fail to get the benefits of other’s experience, but society is deprived of all kinds of desperately needed resources. History tells us that many of the greatest works in culture – art, books, architecture, leadership, love – have been accomplished by people who are older. It would have been interesting to tell Benjamin Franklin or Leo Tolstoy or Ronald Reagan or Georgia O’Keefe or Michaelangelo or Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill that they were past their time and ought to “downsize,” move into their condos and melt away.
   Aging brings challenges, just as being young does. A friend told me that what really defines getting older is that something hurts every morning when you get up. This is true, I think. But nothing to the pain I felt when I was 18.
   And other things are just beginning to ripen and grow – humor, wisdom, empathy, perspective. These are valuable gifts that apply to work and creativity in all sorts of exciting ways.
  Older people do, I think, have to fight for their lives, but not just with blood pressure tests and moderate exercise. They have to affirm again and again that they are alive, creative, full of love and promise and offering great gifts to the world.
  I have to confess that I do not think in terms of age, on either end of the scale. I have stories to tell, and nobody is going to tell me what mine is, at any age.