Are you golden?

The Golden Years

“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.  Years may wrinkle our skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”

                                                  Samuel Ullman

“Unless we see ourselves as part of life’s continuity, whether we’re currently young or old, we will continue to view aging as something apart from mainstream culture, and the old as somehow other.”

                                                  Ram Dass

                                                  From: Still Here

          In my Sunday school class last weekend, one of the participants lamented that he had just celebrated his eightieth birthday and all he had to look forward to now was decline and death.  This particular person has been saying that for as long as I have known him---maybe fifteen years.  Others in the class, both older and younger, simply shook their heads in dismay.  Our culture has done a good job of painting aging as a disease, not a natural part of the life cycle.

          I remember a professor of mine in graduate school, who was perhaps the age that I am now, telling the class, “Getting old is strange, because your body changes but inside you’re still the same person you were at twenty.”  I’m here to tell you, I am not the same person I was at twenty, thank God!  Ram Dass whose book, Still Here, was written after he had a major stroke, draws a distinction between the acquisition of information and wisdom saying, “…wisdom involves another equally crucial function: the emptying and quieting of the mind, the application of the heart, and the alchemy of reason and feeling.” 

Wisdom is not only the province of old people; we have all known young people who were wise beyond their years and old people who were narrow-minded and judgmental.  Wisdom comes with consciously confronting and questioning one’s own convictions and prejudices.  We can not ‘follow the herd’ and acquire wisdom, or at least, it will be a very slow process if we do.  The road to wisdom is paved with life’s errors and the realization that one has done stupid and cruel things and is not better than the next guy.  In other words, it comes as one sheds the ego.  If we’re lucky, that happens relatively early in life instead of late.  The ‘alchemy of reason and feeling’ can turn our baser selves into gold at any age.

                                        Thanks be to God,

                                        Jane