8

Old Age: The Ultimate Test of Spirit

An Essay on Preparation

Spirit! What are we talking about? The unabridged dictionary I consulted begins a full page of definitions with “The breath of life.” But dictionaries can do little more than summarize common usage; and it seems clear to me, after reading the full page of definitions, that there is no well-accepted meaning for this much used and important word.

I conclude, then, that I cannot give a concise definition for spirit, for which old age seems to me to be the ultimate test. The meaning of that word, as I use it, lies beyond the barrier that separates mystery from what we call reality. Yet I have a sharp awareness of spirit when it is present, in myself and others, and I have a depressing feeling of loss when it is absent, in myself and others, at times when it is urgently needed.

I have come to connect spirit, the kind I would like to see more of, to a concept of serve as I see it in the consequences on those being served: do those being served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become stronger, wiser, freer, more at peace with themselves, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what will be the effect on the least privileged in society? Will she or he benefit, or at least not be further deprived? The quality of a society will be judged by what the least privileged in it achieves. My hope for the future rests on the belief that among the legions of deprived and unsophisticated people are many true servants, and that most people can be helped to discriminate among those who presume to serve them, and identify, and respond only to those who are true servants.

Spirit can be said to be the driving force behind the motive to serve. And the ultimate test for spirit in one’s old age is, I believe, can one look back at one’s active life and achieve serenity from the knowledge that one has, according to one’s lights, served? And can one regard one’s present state, no matter how limited by age and health, as one of continuing to serve? One of my deeply etched memories is the view of an old man of 95 sitting by the window of his fisherman’s house on the far out coast of Maine quietly knitting nets for lobster traps which the active fisherman in the family would use. He was still serving with what he could do best at his age.

Much of my present perspective on old age comes from having watched my father grow old. I was very close to him. He was an intelligent and good man but with a fifth-grade education, and he lived a life of limited opportunity. But by a prudent use of his life, he managed to leave a little corner of the world a bit better than he found it. He stands tall in my memory as a model of the true servant. One of my treasured memories as a small boy is attending occasional evening meetings when he was a member of the city council. I would stay awake as long as I could because the meetings were sometimes exciting—tumultuous is a better word—and father was generally in the thick of the action. Then I would curl up in his overcoat behind his chair and go to sleep, to be carried home at the close of the meeting.

Father lived to be 80 and achieved a remarkable serenity in his last years. A couple of years before he died, he told me that he realized that he was in his twilight years and that he had concluded that he should read some of the Bible since he had not read it at all. Then he added plaintively, “I tried, but I quickly gave it up because it made no sense.”

When I was about 13, I recall listening to a conversation with a committee from our church that had come to try and persuade father to raise his quite nominal contribution. Father listened patiently and then said, “No.” He thought his contribution was about right. He was glad the church was there, but as an instrument for doing good in the world he rated it well below both his labor union and his political party. The committee left in a huff.

In his old age, father once commented to me, “The tragedy of our town is that it once had a great people but it no longer has them.” In his judgment the “status” people of our town—bankers, industrialists, merchants, professional people—were all mediocre. In the heat of one of father’s political battles, the town’s leading citizen, in money and prestige, tried to buy him off.

There is a much greater story to tell about my father but I will take another occasion for that. I have given enough of that story here to suggest that my early formative years when I was very close to him have shaped the way my life unfolded in important ways. I have given this much to suggest that watching my father grow old was a very special kind of experience, and it alerted me to watch my own aging so that I came into my old age with my eyes open—and aware.

I also feel it important to note that I did not grow up in a church-identified home. Consequently, I found it necessary to think my own way through a spiritual orientation for my life. There was much in the model of my father to guide me and it overshadowed what I got from the little exposure I had to churches. I am not recommending mine as the best way to grow up. I am simply noting what it was because it had a great deal to do with the adventure in preparation on which I have been embarked.

At 50, father suffered a health setback from which he recovered, but he dropped out of politics. In his old age, he told me that this was a wise move. “All of my old political cronies my age are gone. If I had won my last contest for office, that would have put me into the big money and I probably would not be here today. I am lucky that I lost.” What he did not say, but I would observe, is he would have missed the joy of the serenity of his old age.

I have now gone past 80 and I have entered a new phase of life that I will comment on later, and I have frequent occasion to reflect on the quality of my father’s old age, at a time when the Bible made no sense, and after an active life in which he rated churches in a quite inferior position. And I have concluded that, with all of this, he was a deeply religious man; and, he would be seen as religious in any peace-loving culture. I see his basic religious feeling as the root of his serenity, and I think of him now as one who was sustained by great human spirit all of his life.

My father and his father had lived their whole lives in the town where I was born and lived until I was 20, and father was deeply disappointed that I did not choose to make my home there. At age 22, I had made my career decision and I would go wherever it led me. Ultimately, it led to New York where I lived for 40 years. My roots, however, are in my father’s tradition in Terre Haute, Indiana. These roots are still very much a part of me in my older years, even though the more than 60 years since I left Terre Haute have been in a very different world from the one my father lived in. Those 20 years with him in Terre Haute were the years of my formation, and they have stayed with me. I am sorry about people who reach old age without being aware of their roots.

Malcolm Cowley’s little book, The View From Eighty, makes the point that rings true to my experience: that most of the literature about aging is written by younger people who have not been there, and that until one passes through that magic number that makes one old, one really cannot appreciate what old age is like. I could not have anticipated the view of life that I now have. And I may not be able to describe it in a way that is meaningful to younger people, perhaps not even to my own age group because I suspect that we oldsters are just as different, one from the other, as we have been at earlier stages in life. Each of us in our old age may be at the point of summing up our own unique experience and examining, and relating to, the very different roots from which we spring: roots that have shaped our whole existence.

I have long pondered those lines with which Robert Browning opens his poem “Rabbi Ben Ezra”:

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be;

The last of life for which the first was made.

A friend my age who is crippled with arthritis recently wrote quoting those lines and concluding with, “Bah!” I suppose that if I were wracked with pain my response might be the same. In the absence of that pain I keep wondering what is that “best” that Browning was talking about, or did he know what he was talking about?

I have long been a meditator, and as I have grown older, meditation has become more central to my existence and takes much more of the typical day. I have taken training in both transcendental and Buddhist meditation, but my current meditation practices are pretty much my own. I have arrived at a point where I prefer my own private meditation to any formal religious service. As I have grown older, I have come to value solitude more and more. I doubt that I would ever want to be a hermit and live in complete isolation, but I definitely limit my contact with people and this tendency is growing. My wife and I, without talking about it, have evolved a relationship in which there is very little conversation. We enjoy being together and we appreciate our solitude together. Neither of us feels the need to be entertained, nor do we yearn to be young again.

I read some, but much less than I once did—although my vision is still good. Much of what I do read is rereading what I have read before, and I continue to find fresh meaning.

At age 75 I stopped making speeches, though I was still active. At 80 I stopped going to meetings, and I no longer travel at all. I use an automobile for local shopping only, and I will soon give that up.

At age 73, my wife and I entered a lifecare retirement community. I don’t believe it is a good idea to segregate old people this way and thus limit their interaction with younger people. Both the old and the young lose by it. Someday, when we are a more civilized people and have come to live in and appreciate community, I suspect places like the one I now live in will be abandoned. We chose to come here because it was the best option available to us. If we were making the choice today, we would come to the same place we now live. The conscientious Quakers who run the place we live in do a good job of managing the services on which we depend. We are served by caring and sensitive people, and the trustees keep the place solvent, which is more than can be said for some places like this. I am deeply grateful to the dedicated trustees who maintain the integrity of the place where I will spend my last years.

We try to be friendly with fellow residents, and there are a few with whom we occasionally share meals. But my wife and I stay clear away from the frenetic activity, the game playing, and the traveling to exotic places that occupy so much of people’s time. Most of my interaction with people is with younger people in active careers elsewhere. I share their joys and sorrows and I believe I give them something of value from my relative detachment and my more meditative life. And they give much to me. I know that at age 83 I am lucky to have these relationships with younger active people, and I appreciate them.

Occasionally I am asked what it is like to be old; and there is some conversation about it. I am not sure I can put it down in black and white, but I will try.

As I see it now, my most interesting and productive years were from 60 to 75. This was not so much that I was a late bloomer, but because from 40 to 60 I made conscious preparation (more on that later) for a second career, and I had a really good one. Also, that new career that started at age 60 rested on 38 years as a disciplined organization man in a huge bureaucracy. A disciplined life can be lived in many ways, but the kind I had in my early work was absolutely essential for a good second career. People who have managed their lives without experiencing that kind of sustained discipline, both the bitter and the sweet, seem to me to have missed something important.

I have never been a “high energy” person, and at 75 there were definite signals that I should slow down. I welcomed the change of pace. I stopped traveling altogether, something I had done a great deal of. In a way, this may be seen as the start of a third career, a very low-key one. Now, at age 83, I write some, reflect a lot, see a few people, and occasionally write a letter to someone in active life suggesting some line of thought or action. I do not miss the more active life I used to lead.

There may have been a special impact of the big round number 80 that I passed three years ago. Our children put on a big party for my wife and me so we could not overlook the fact that something important had happened. A different view of life gradually emerged. I always knew that I was not immortal but as I passed 80 I became aware that I was in a “countdown” era. It was not that the signs of death were imminent, but I slowly became more detached. This has been a new and different phase, an even more radical break than I made at age 60 when I retired from my main career and started a second career; or, at 75 when I stopped traveling, except that this time there was not a precise point of change. I had come to realize that I could no longer serve by carrying an active role in the world. I would only get in the way if I tried. Now, I came to accept, I can best serve by being. It was not a new career, like it could have been seen at age 75 when the major change I made was to stop traveling and making speeches. Now, no mountains to climb. I may continue to do some things, mostly writing; but it is no longer “production.” Whether I get it done or not is no longer important, as it used to be.

I scan the daily newspaper but I rarely listen to radio or TV news—because they cannot be scanned. I prefer to meditate, and I have come to view my meditating as serving. Somehow the quiet and peace of anyone’s meditation communicates and enriches the culture. I feel the fruits of other people’s meditation.

Reviewing or summing up my life is not a preoccupation. Occasionally I call up something out of the past as a help in clearing my thought about where I now am—and I hope to remain sharply aware of where I am. I do not brood on the past. There have been errors, failures, and hurts but they were in that other existence from which I am now quite separated, and I look back on it with detachment, as if it were the record of another’s life.

The main difference between this present past-80 period and my earlier old age when I still felt myself to be in a career, of having a work, may be that up to recently there has always been a future that would ultimately be connected with the present as the past. Now there is no future and there is really no past. There is only a history that may as well be another’s past. There is only now. Maybe this is the “best” that Robert Browning assured us of: finally to achieve living wholly in the present moment, unencumbered with the record of one’s past and oblivious to the future, and accepting of the loss of energy and the passions of youth. I believe this is what my father achieved in his old age. He bound over to me a sense of rest and being at peace with himself and the world, and I recognized this state when I arrived at 80, 34 years after my father’s death. I find this chapter of my life as rewarding as any previous one. And I feel a greater sense of continuity with my father’s life than I ever felt before.

Let me hasten to add to what I have just said: these recent changes have not put me in a state of euphoria, although I feel okay most of the time. I have withdrawn from active participation in society and live in a lifecare community. Consequently, the usual frustrations and irritations of life have been substantially reduced. But when these do occur, as on occasion they still do, my reaction is little different from what it has always been.

I have noted that my father in his 80th and most serene year, could lament the tragedy of our town because of the paucity of great people in it. So I, in my 83rd year and with a much larger view of the world than my father had, now lament what seems the small number among those who see themselves as able, conscientious, and dedicated, and who are disposed to respond to a vision of the larger roles they might play and the much greater service to society that the institutions they influence might render. We have plenty of people with the ability and the stamina to build and lead a much more serving society and I believe they would lead fuller lives, if they would rise to their opportunities. What they seem to lack is spirit, and I wonder what they will be like when they grow old. Will they find it the “best” that is yet to be? I said at the outset that I cannot define spirit. But I have tried in what I have said to give human spirit a meaning that is beyond rational definition.

Earlier I noted, as I look back now, my years from 60 to 75 were in some ways my most interesting and productive because, in part, from age 40 to 60 I made conscious preparation for my old age. When I was about 40, I had the good fortune to read an article by a radio commentator of that day, Elmer Davis. Davis had a coronary attack when he was past 60 that slowed him down and made him more reflective. Out of his reflection came an essay entitled, “The Uses of Old People.” In it he made the point that old people can be particularly useful, not just for the reason that they are more seasoned and experienced, but because there are important things to be done that are best done by old people, either because they do not fit well into a career or they are too risky for younger people to undertake. Furthermore, he advised that young people should look forward to, and prepare for old age as a time of potentially great usefulness rather than as a time when one is put out to pasture when one wears out. This message came through to me loud and clear, and I resolved that I would then begin to prepare for a second career at age 60 when I could elect my pension where I worked.

I had been reasonably successful in my work and my volunteer activity up to age 40, but I realized that I was not a person of great talents or highly specialized abilities, and that I would not emerge at age 60 as a much sought after professional. Without a specific second career in mind, what would I prepare for?

Making plans for my life has never been a preoccupation. I left college with the aim of entering a big business and with the expectation that my career would evolve as opportunities presented themselves and as the spirit moved me. This strategy had served well up to age 40, and I saw no reason to change it. I simply had my eye on age 60 when I would start a second career (if I was still around), and in those intervening years I would continue to evolve, but with the aim that I was preparing for something that I could not then define. I had no idea what my old age would be like or what I would do with it. “Take it as it comes” was my motto as it had been up to that point. I do not recall that I thought in these terms, but I seemed to set out to favor and accelerate the kind of evolutionary development that had taken place up to age 40. I did not awake each morning with the question, “What will I do today to prepare for my old age?” In fact, once I embarked on this course, I rarely gave it a thought. It simply became a way of life, and there was a good deal of chance in it. What was different was that I became more venturesome and experimental in doing things that would widen my horizons and enlarge my self-understanding. All that I am now sure of is that I arrived at age 60 well prepared to be useful, and that interesting and challenging opportunities that I could not have anticipated at age 40 were numerous; more than I could take on.

I am quite a “private” person and I shared this thinking only with my wife, who understood and approved. I am sure, however, that I was considered “odd” by my friends and associates because I did unconventional things. It is also clear that my superiors in my company were at times a bit puzzled about what to do with me. I know they regarded me as valuable because they paid me well. But valuable for what? They resolved their puzzlement when I was 50 by appointing me director of Management Research, providing me with sufficient budget to hire a professional staff, and giving me a broad charter to research and advise regarding the management of this huge company, especially how its top structure functioned (or failed to function). My last ten years with my company were excellent preparation for my old age, better than any other executive post I know about. I have often wondered how the choices I made in using my optional time, both inside and outside the company, contributed to how my final role there evolved. However, it was not a bed of roses. While I had the charter and the responsibility and the budget, the bureaucracy did not understand it, and I was in collision with the establishment all over the place. This too was good preparation for living with ambiguity and served me well in my second career. When I retired, the position disappeared. I could not train a successor. That person would have to prepare himself or herself as I did. And no one did.

In writing about my experience now, I hope to encourage others to resolve in their own ways to prepare for their old age, to prepare to face uncertainty. Such preparation, if wisely done, may not only favor a fruitful old age but it may, as with me, make the years of preparation more productive and enjoyable. I recall that once a colleague my age, one who was obviously not preparing, came into my office one morning, seated himself before my desk, puffed violently on his cigarette for several seconds, and then said, “I am leading a life of quiet desperation!” Later, when we had both retired, he called my wife one morning and asked her advice on how he could get into the kind of work I was doing. Shortly after I had announced my retirement, a close friend who was president of one of our subsidiaries, a very successful man as measured by income and prestige, lunched with me and asked how, when he retired in a couple of years, could he get into the kind of work I would be doing. I had to say, as gently as I could tell him, “No way!” If one will settle for a retirement of golf and fishing and simple civic chores, no preparation may be needed. But if one wants one’s life to ascend creatively and in new ways, as long as one has one’s wits, then my experience would suggest that one is well advised to prepare.

In my later years in my company, I did some lecturing in business schools. When I described my role in my company some of the students’ eyes would brighten and someone would say, “That is the kind of job I would like to have.” To which I would reply, “I should tell you that it took me 25 years to get into a position to do this work.” And the response would likely be, “Oh no! Maybe 6 months, but not 25 years” (as much as most of them had already lived). And I would say, “Maybe you could do it in less; but you would have to take the time to build the trust that this kind of unstructured role requires. I have the charter because the company has some needs and feels some pains that no one can define with precision. For those in charge, trust that I will search for and carry out actions that will do more good than harm. That trust needs to be high and one does not earn it quickly. Whatever your career, if you would like to evolve into a position of great trust, then you will need to use your opportunities in a way that constitutes preparation for being given that trust.” Young people have a hard time grappling with that idea, but it is of the very essence.

A detailed account of my 40 to 60 preparation would not be useful to another. Everyone should chart her or his own course. I will give a brief summary of mine just to suggest the range of opportunities that may be available if one opens one’s imagination and is alert to opportunities, which the two colleagues noted above seemed unwilling, perhaps lacked the courage, to do.

I made the decision to prepare for my old age near the end of WWII, when commercial air travel was just resuming. I made the firm resolve that I would not fly in connection with my work. I did not want to be speeded up. The trains were still good and I enjoyed train travel. But mostly I valued the meditative intervals that train travel afforded. I do not recall that I thought this through at the time but, in retrospect, meditative intervals have been very important to me—both long ones and short ones. It has sometimes been crucial, in the heat of controversy, to withdraw into the silence for just a few seconds so that the creative processes can function. For a big idea to evolve, I have found that a big chunk of meditative time is required, and train riding was sometimes the best way for me to get those big chunks.

I have seldom gotten an important learning from reading. I am slow and it is hard work. Most of my learning in this 40 to 60 period was in conversation with people. I got as much out of organizing my thoughts as I did from listening, and listening was important. I found my way to people interested in sharing (and I had much to share, especially in those last ten years) with people whose perspectives were different from mine and who made me stretch.

Two years were spent in weekly sessions with Jungian analysts (one year with a woman, one with a man) on the analysis of my dreams. These sessions greatly enlarged my awareness of my inner life, and I believe my creativity was quickened.

I developed a really close relationship with several quite different institutions: The Menninger (psychiatric) Foundation, The U.S. Air Force, and the National Council of Churches, along with several large businesses. I accepted my first teaching position in a university-related school for managers with which I worked for parts of seven summers.

Most important in all of this was my relationship with people. In the last part of my AT&T career, I became interested in the ethics of the company (to the discomfort of some well-placed people), which led me to establish a relationship with professors of ethics in Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant seminaries. Some close friendships developed, especially my friendship with Rabbi Abraham J. Heschel.

I am not a scholar, and little of my work in this period was centered on reading, with two exceptions. I made quite an in-depth study of the history of AT&T. Because of being in the corporate office, I had access to the archives. I made a determined, but unsuccessful, effort to interest the executives of the company in that rich history, by knowledge of which officers and directors might have saved the company from dissolution in 1984. The other study in this period was to read extensively in the history of the Religious Society of Friends. This was useful in my retirement years when I wrote regularly for an outstanding Quaker magazine, Friends Journal. Both of these excursions into the history of institutions with which I was very familiar confirm what a noted historian once said, “The main thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history.” Both of these depth interests in the history of institutions I was involved with were important parts of my years of preparation, and both were enjoyable activities while I engaged in them.

I noted above two of my AT&T colleagues who were my age and who retired and found themselves rudderless. Both had the same opportunity to prepare for their old age that I had, and the preparation I experienced would have made a more enjoyable existence while they did it. Both were better scholars than I, one Phi Beta Kappa, but neither apparently heard the same signal that I did at age 40. Perhaps they were not listening for signals as I was, all of the time—and still am. Neither of them lived long after retirement.

In giving some details of my own preparation I am not suggesting that what I did would be appropriate or possible for anyone else. But of this I am quite sure: anyone who thinks of his or her old age as an event to be prepared for is more likely to have a more fruitful old age than one who has not thought that way, regardless of what his or her preparation consists of. Whether one’s gifts and opportunities are great or small, my advice would be—prepare!

The temptation to be resisted by highly gifted people, I believe, is the hope (if they think about it at all) that they will be able to exploit their gifts to the end. Some may make it through life on that assumption (charitable friends may assure them they are making it when an objective appraisal might tell them that they are not). I have just finished a new biography of a leading theologian of a generation past, a man of exceptional gifts. He had a health setback as he approached old age, and he spent miserable years fretting that he could no longer exploit his gifts as he once did. He was unprepared.

What would adequate preparation have meant to such a person? I can only speculate. It seems to me that one of the signs of emerging maturity is an acceptance of life’s fragility and acceptance of new conditions, whatever they may be, plus recognition of G. K. Chesterton’s admonition that (life’s) “wildness lies in wait.” It is not an obsessive preoccupation that makes one sick or fearful. It is alertness, readiness to respond when it is appropriate to respond. As one attains maturity, one learns to live peacefully and sleep well with a submerged awareness of constant danger. The most important part of preparation for old age may be awareness, while one is young, that a time will come when one steps aside from one’s main career and life will be different. If one looks forward to a second career in which appropriate old age involvements are at the center, then it seems important that one make that change—if one has the option—while one still has the energy to undertake it, and that one prepare for that change.

Old age may be one of those conditions that everyone knows about but for which some do not prepare. The benefit of preparing may be that no matter what impairments one suffers, one can make a good life of it as long as one has one’s wits. (When one’s wits are gone, it doesn’t matter.) It may be that what deters some people from preparing for such a contingency as old age is want of courage, what Paul Tillich called “The Courage to Be”—the courage to be aware and to live comfortably with the constant threat of adversity, pain and anxiety. I suspect that what results from such want of courage is a false security that may betray one when one faces old age and finds that one lacks what Fosdick called “The Power to See Life Through.” Thus, serenity may not be what one achieves in old age; it may be one of the fruits of what one has learned by preparing while one is young.

There are many signals all of the time that will cue one to the ideas that will make life more rewarding, at all stages. But one is likely to hear those signals only if one is alert to signals, all of the time. The problem is that there is a baffling number of signals if one is alert to them, and one must choose which of them one will heed. At this point meditation will serve, at all stages of life. Not only do our rational reflective processes sometimes function better in meditation, but one may develop sensitivity to intimations from beyond the barrier that separates what we call reality from mystery. Jung might say that in meditation we may tap the collective unconscious. What appears in meditation is sometimes the same as what appears in dreams. Then, in one’s conscious logic, one can always ask, “Is the originator of this signal really acting in the spirit of my servant?”

When, at age 40, I heard the signal from Elmer Davis, “prepare now for your old age,” I judged him to be a true servant and heeded his advice. In the perspective of 43 years’ experience, I find that earlier judgment confirmed. I am grateful to Elmer Davis, and to my father, and many other true servants for the gifts of spirit, by both advice and example, that have sustained me. Old age is the ultimate test of spirit.

Surviving from my Boy Scout experience 70 years ago is the motto: Be prepared. I am eternally grateful for it.

And I am grateful to E. B. White for “Sufficient is the remembrance of the beauty I have seen.” That remembrance is always with me, and I do not have to see it again.