Life Prisms and Growing Old

You know the talk that Steve Jobs gave at a commencement where he said the dots can only be connected looking back? Yeah, well, no one ever could explain to me at that time what that could possibly mean. That was until I got to a point in life where so many snippets of memory, life, feelings, thoughts came together and started assembling themselves into seemingly random yet deeply co-meaningful (I just created that word I think) messages.

I don’t think one entry would be sufficient or successful in expressing some of these incidents/occurrences/phenomena, so I will break them into separate entities as they bubble to the surface.

Older People from the Younger Perspective

There is something about older people that irritates the younger. Is it just that they move, talk, remember, slower? Do younger people see that as inconvenience to them? Do they just lose patience with the pace? Or could it be that there is some subconscious fear of their own slowing? Regardless, where I think that irritation is misguided and simply wrong is that the younger person often, albeit most probably subconsciously done, places a sort of blame on the older person for choosing to be that way. Is that because they remember the older person in times of better wellness? Perhaps, but perhaps it is just because the younger person has not gotten old enough to reflect and see better, more, broader.

It is correct then that we only connect the dots backward, and that the young live in a narrower prism of life that cannot allow for a more possibility because they haven’t gotten there yet.

And so, this morning, after my fajr prayer, and as I was stretching and noting stiffness in my legs, I got it.

I remembered throughout my life, when I was briefly a dancer at the North Carolina School of the Arts, and when I taught aerobics, and rode horses, and on and on, how limber and full of energy I was. And I started to think about growing older and when had that changed in my body…but there was no one time or point I could think of. I am not that old, after all. But then it came to me. I had lost limberness and flexibility gradually as I sort of placed some aspects of myself lower in priority.

I had a lost degree of flexibility in the sitting at a NICU hospital bedside for weeks. I had a lost degree of flexibility in holding and carrying three babies/toddlers whom I wanted always to protect and love. I had a lost degree of flexibility in the endless worrying over their lives and happiness. I had a lost degree of flexibility in missing their company. I had simply lost degrees of flexibility in loving.

A seemingly stupidly obvious connection of dots assembled itself in my mind then. Often, older people are unaware that they have slowed or stiffened or become irritating to the young and that is because their self-vision was eclipsed by an other-vision. They were often busy incrementally giving themselves away in love for others.

What a shame it is that the young have to get old before they can fully appreciate that the old are not just hollower, slower versions of their youthful selves; they have simply, through necessity and love, broadened their prism to allow and bask in others’ light, and love.

And so perhaps aging is a stiffening in some respects, but at the same time, it is a beautiful and generous limbering as well.