Tag Archives: Age

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Is Lateral a Direction?

Damn! There they go again, pulling the masks off the faces of those of us who grew up hoping we were uniquely creative; those of us who eschewed the logical pathway of thoughts and instead stepped off the trail to see if anything was hiding in the bushes. That’s what we lateral thinkers like to think we do -I say ‘we’ laterally, of course. Although I certainly wasn’t a child in the 1960ies, it was a time when my hormones had settled sufficiently to allow me to think of things further afield -more laterally than chromosomally. In fact, I suspect it still wandered more than I would have liked, but the era was wrapped in sunlight and the resulting chiaroscuro made it hard to look in one direction only.

The stage was set, it seems, for someone like  Edward de Bono, a Maltese doctor and researcher, to write The Use of Lateral Thinking which espoused just what I had found myself doing: relaxing the need for vertical (logical?) thinking. Actually, he decided that several things needed to change if we wanted to be creative: things like recognizing that some ideas were especially persuasive, so we needed to find different ways of looking at them -and this meant pursuing a different way of approaching and solving problems, even if it involved incorporating serendipity.

It struck me as a relaxing way to approach life and although I never really went in for piercings or drugs, I could see how it might be seductive to some people. But it’s hard to maintain a belief when people keep poking holes in it. And it’s especially hard to feel safe within a dogma when the innards of the pillars you thought were supporting the roof are showing signs of decay. Still, I imagine stuff evolves as time moves on.

I suppose I did, anyway, although I couldn’t quite surrender the suspicion that there was value in approaching questions as if they were actually answers in disguise -well, at least that was the message I took from the lateral thinking craze. And then, I happened upon an essay in Aeon by Antonio Melechi, an honorary research fellow in the department of sociology at the University of York, which seemed to suggest that lateral thinking was, of all things, a pseudoscience: https://aeon.co/essays/lateral-thinking-is-classic-pseudoscience-derivative-and-untested

Imagine my disappointment when I read that ‘Historians of science questioned why de Bono invested so much in the genius ‘eureka’ moment, when invention and paradigm shifts were more commonly the work of communal endeavour and disputation.’ Not that I’ve ever experienced a genius moment, or anything, but I’ve always revelled in sudden surges in understanding that seemed to spring from a good night’s sleep. ‘Psychologists had more questions than most. Lateral thinking clearly overplayed the importance of the creative breakthrough at the expense of trial and error, feedback and reflection, not to mention unconscious incubation.’

I suppose I’ve always been an incubator, though -much as the process may cast the strength of my underlying gender into shadowy regions. But nonetheless incubation, however unconscious, is still eurekoid, don’t you think? It’s still sort of lateral -something that conscious processes await until ideas can be suddenly and perhaps even mysteriously hatched from wherever.

De Bono and his lateral thinking has been criticized as being more derivative than seminal; but, does it matter who first named it? Melechi points out that, there has been ‘a long history of research into creativity, a rich treasury of thought and experiment that had almost certainly provided lateral thinking with most of its magpie principles and pre-owned methods.’ For example, in a lecture in 1880, the famous American philosopher and psychologist, William James ‘observed that the ‘highest order of minds’ had a knack for straying from the ‘beaten track of habitual suggestion… we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzing and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.’

Actually, ‘Known to some Enlightenment philosophes as ‘negative imagination’, this mercurially creative sensibility remained in the shadow of pathology and degeneration for much of the 19th century, and it fell to a new wave of French psychologists to push for its study and rehabilitation.’ So, ‘the mathematician and polymath Henri Poincaré dug deep into the ‘sudden illuminations’ that punctuated his research. The unbidden insights that had propelled him to make discoveries across various fields were, Poincaré insisted, evidence of complex work being undertaken subliminally, over days and weeks, as he busied himself with unrelated issues.’

Gestalt psychology also identified the very notion of lateral thinking in all but name. ‘Wertheimer [psychologist Max Wertheimer] noted that logical-analytical thinking, or reproductive thinking, was hostage to repetition, habit and intellectual precedent. Insight and breakthrough, in science and everyday life, needed the irruption of ‘productive thinking’, the ability to look at a situation or problem from a new perspective.’

On and on goes the evidence to suggest that only the name ‘Lateral Thinking’ was new, and there I was thinking that I was finally surfing on a wave I could handle. That somehow it had unlocked the door to a personal heuristic (to use a lateral-thinkingly-derived change of idiom).

Perhaps there are no shortcuts to wisdom, though. There’s no sense in simply wandering through the woods only to stumble into an unsuspected field of flowers rather than the missing answer for which you were searching.

Is it a sign of Age, though, that searching always needs to be teleologically driven? Planned, in other words? That there needs to be a reason for the search, other than bald, ungarnished curiosity? That you need an already prepared question to get an answer…?

Answers lie all around us, scattered like those wildflowers in the meadow; surely what we really need to do is find the right questions. The right keys that fit the locks. I don’t know about you, but I have always travelled with questions stuffed in my pockets. And so, if I happen to stumble upon an answer I hadn’t expected to be sleeping just off the trail somewhere, I merely fumble around in my jacket for the suitable question that I didn’t even know I was carrying.

Is that Lateral Thinking?

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Let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow

Colour has always held me in thrall. I suspect I can trace its origins to those pre-recollection times when my mother read to me as I sat pointing at pictures in whatever book she had chosen for my bedtime. I had my favourites, I imagine, but all I can remember from those very early years were the vivid colours. They seemed more important than the words she spoke, or perhaps more accurately, they were the words, alive and beckoning from the page -depictions of things I suppose I was yet too young to understand. But, as the poet Kahlil Gibran once wrote, Let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow. And in those days, I think I did.

There are still faint traces of this atavism that linger in the colours I see in numbers, but I hesitate to attribute beauty to the pallid tints afforded to me from a lingering synaesthesia in my doddering years. They possess no magic -in fact, I rather think I’d like to colour them in bolder pigments that would elevate them like saints from their boring lists.

But there I go again -the need to colour things is strong, yet unfulfilled. Although my father tried his best to guide my hand, I never managed to colour within the lines of the many books that called me to my crayons. In looking back to those halcyon days, I suspect I saw the outlines as prisons I needed to escape -early evidence, maybe, of how I saw edges more as links to things around them, than boundaries that brooked no trespass.

At any rate, now that I am in Macbeth’s famous yellow leaf, I have begun to realize the subtle allure of margins. More often than not, they are only beginnings -invitations to explore what lies beyond. To experience only that which is insensibly glued to us is not to transgress, and yet skin is merely the introductory handshake with the world.

Of course, with age comes the inevitable rationalizations of both past behaviours and current epiphanies: things to excuse my inability to confine myself to standard doctrinal crayonal restraints -times when I no doubt felt I could label my obvious lack of talent as youthful exuberance. Seeing what others could not, outside the lines.

But in those almost ante-Gutenberg days, the choices I was offered in the colouring books to which I was privy, were not legion -a few standardized animals, and the occasional landscape which almost always included a house with a smoking chimney. None of these encouraged much experimentation outside the lines without confusing whatever archetypal subject with which I was forced to contend. Indeed, in retrospect I’m surprised that any of the obediently constrained colouring book acolytes ever succeeded in Art or Philosophy -or Life, for that matter- although I suppose there has always been more support for those who obey the rules.

The subject matter has changed however, I’m happy to report. As I was browsing through my Smithsonian app archives, I was drawn (sorry) to an article reporting on new colouring opportunities that promised great things: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/100-museums-transformed-their-collections-free-coloring-pages-just-you-180974116/

Written by Katherine J. Wu, a science journalist, as well as a PhD. in Microbiology and Immunobiology from Harvard, she notes that most classical historical art is preserved and guarded in museums, and is almost never made available to public crayons.

Recently, however, ‘with the annual  #ColorOurCollections social media campaign, the world’s art enthusiasts can try them out. The idea was apparently first launched by the New York Academy of Medicine Library [NYAM] in 2016. People can ‘download, color and reimagine thousands of black-and-white artworks sourced from dozens of cultural mainstays around the world. Currently at 101 strong, the list may continue to grow and is already encroaching on last year’s roster of 114 participants.

‘Among the institutions advertising their contributions are representatives from the academic world, including  Harvard University’s Countway Library and the University of Waterloo, as well as museums like  Les Champs Libres and the Huntington Library. The only commonality shared by the thousands of prints and drawings available on the NYAM website is their black-and-white appearance.’

There is a time-limit for these downloads (already passed, I’m afraid) but ‘this year’s illustrations—as well as a large repository of past submissions—will remain available to download.’

The temptation was overwhelming, and so I risked the ever-present threat of being phished and followed the links. Some of the drawings were just too charming to resist, so I have to admit to planning a trip to Walmart to stock up on crayons -I still feel more comfortable with them than coloured pencils with their oh-so precisely sharpenable points that seem programmed to stop on their own at each and every line they encounter.

I ended up buying a 96-pack box of crayons online, though, since I was there anyway. Do you remember what it was like in a candy store when you were a child and your mother asked you to choose, oh maybe five, from the thousands of specimens on display? I always chose the brightest coloured wrappers, not realizing that what they contained seldom lived up to their appearance. I suppose what I’m getting at is that I should probably have chosen the basic crayon box of 16 (Maybe it’s not in their best interests to sell an even smaller-sized selection) because I really only used the red (for the sundry brick walls and chimneys), blue (for the sky -what else?), and green (by now, I’m sure you can guess) -childhood habits, I imagine. I did colour-shift once or twice though, once I really got into it.

Sometimes a building, or the garden in front of it seemed to beg for what I would now rationalize as an aura and I would grab a yellow and engage in what might seem to be random smears outside the lines. I tried orange and pink on a whim, but they seemed garish somehow -like Parkinsonian blunders. Not at all what I was striving for.

And yet, I’m beginning to wonder if I was actually striving for anything other than proving to myself that there’s still a remnant of the younger me inside. My hoped-for free form seemed contrived at my age. And that which drew gasps of admiration for my extra-linear adventures when I was a toddler, now seemed to bespeak something far more ominous than naïve playfulness. At my age, I suspect it is not seen as a mere idiosyncrasy. Society is harder on its elders than its children for their misadventures, I fear. More suspicious. More circumspect.

It was epiphanous that I suddenly recognized the freedom I had to lose were I to leave evidence of my folly in plain view. Even the crayons might arouse concerns -provoke questions I would as lief avoid. It is perhaps enough to live through youth but once; any return may be judged as an ill-advised trip through the mirror, so I have donated my uncoloured downloads to the community kindergarten. Perhaps I will return some time to see what they have decided to pin on their walls; I’d like to see if they have dared to show any crayonal attempts by their children that stray beyond accepted boundaries. Of course, maybe they only use soft felt pens with sharply pointed edges and raised, built-in borders to colour nowadays -I forgot to ask…

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Is time really out of joint?

I imagine there comes a time for each of us when we finally realize we are getting old; a time when we feel that we are just catching up on news so aged that we were only children when it first arose. Information so old that I’m not sure what it should be called –opinion perhaps; or, since it is still around and circulating quietly and seemingly  immune to the cobwebs draped across its shoulders, wisdom…? And although some things may really be changing quickly, others are just now soaking through like water in a thick sponge and seem new to me.

I realize that not even young people can stay au courant with everything -the trick, I suppose, is to specialize one’s interests. Mine were never all that well defined, it seems; apart from my particular professional métier, the rest was spread as unevenly as the peanut butter on my morning toast. Retirement merely allowed me to pile more toppings on it, I fear -some of them dated, albeit untarnished by their ages, and, as far as I can tell, unburdened by a best-before stipulation.

Thus did I discover Simone de Beauvoir’s writings as I began redabbling in the existentialist work of Sartre. The two of them were an item, you remember. At any rate, I soon realized I would need some help, so it was with no little relief that I happened upon an edifying essay by Kate Kirkpatrick, a lecturer in religion, philosophy, and culture  at King’s College London among other things. https://aeon.co/essays/simone-de-beauvoirs-authentic-love-is-a-project-of-equals

‘The desires to love and be loved are, on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, part of the structure of human existence. Often, they go awry. But even so, she claimed, authentic love is not only possible but one of the most powerful tools available to individuals who want to be free… In The Second Sex (1949), Beauvoir argued that culture led men and women to have asymmetrical expectations, with the result that ‘love’ frequently felt like a battlefield of conflicting desires or a graveyard for their disappointments… As a young philosophy student in Paris, she had already recognised that some conceptions of ‘love’ legitimated injustice and perpetuated suffering.’

Some of what she observed in those days no longer obtains, of course -Zeitgeist evolves along with societal values- and yet there are still things to be learned from her writings. Pitfalls to avoid in our headlong rush for change.

‘Beauvoir’s ethics were shaped by a tradition according to which whom and what we love plays a pivotal role in whom we become.’ And love, as difficult to define then as now, ‘was abused to legitimate forms of hierarchy that were anathema to love itself.’ As she saw it in her early writings, love had two components: self-interest (narcissism), and devotion – the former plagued by forgetting there are two in love and that love must seek the good of the other, whereas the latter (devotion) can be suffocating -a form of ‘moral suicide’ in its abnegation of self.

‘Ethical love, by contrast, consists in what Beauvoir calls ‘equilibrium’ and ‘reciprocity’. In equilibrium there is self-giving without self-loss: lover and beloved ‘simply walk side by side, mutually helping each other a little’.’ And yet, suppose one of the two does not feel equal -or feel they have not earned or deserved the love of the other? ‘The ‘most fruitful’ type of love, Beauvoir claimed, was ‘not a subordination’, but rather a relationship in which each person supported the other in seeking an independent, individual life.’

Despite my lengthening toll of years, I have to admit that, although her initial observations make sense, I am more intrigued by the direction in which they evolved. Obviously, unlike De Beauvoir, I had not taken as much time or effort to analyze the question of love. Throughout my life, I suspect I have been more a captive than a general.

Later, reflecting on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Beauvoir came to realize that ‘One is not the neighbour of anyone. One makes the other a neighbour by treating him as a neighbour in action.’ Love required action. There was a growing concern about the meaning of life that was rife in France towards the end of WWII that bred the existentialist movement, one of whose champions, was Sartre. Beauvoir (in Pyrrhus and Cinéas) suggested ‘an answer to the problem of how human life could have value, and how ethics could have a foundation, without a God to provide them. Her proposal was that, in the absence of a divine law-giver, our actions should be oriented to the human others because, even without an infinite being, our actions can take on an infinite dimension by being witnessed.’ We need to love and be loved; we need to be affirmed.

But there is a middle road. ‘Devotion can be tyrannical – it claims to want the good of the other but in fact it imposes a value on the other that might not be of his or her choosing. The ‘ethics of self-interest’ [narcissism], by contrast, assumes that only I could meet the other person’s need for justification: it makes the other a satellite, whose value is contingent upon being in my orbit… What is truly needed, on Beauvoir’s view, is that the other be respected as ‘a freedom’: as a person who is perpetually becoming, with projects for her life that must be of her choosing… there must be two freedoms, both of which respect the value of freedom in each other – such that neither of them suffers the mutilation of subordination.’ Reciprocity, in other words.

Much as I continue to have trouble forcing myself to struggle through Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I’m still trying to psyche myself into reading her Second Sex, but like eating, it’s probably wise to stop when you’re full. In a sense, we all have rumens in our brains that allow us to re-chew what we’ve read to make more sense of it -put it in a more contemporary context, perhaps.

I suspect, for example, that most of us are at least more aware of the existence of hierarchical societal roles that still begrudge women their rightful places in the world. Even the ability to see that there are hierarchies is a victory of sorts; it seems almost unbelievable when we remember that at one time men could claim ‘that it was just in their nature to dominate women – and that it was in women’s nature to submit.’ It was culture that was sanctioning this, and just as society has been evolving, so too, however slowly, has the male Weltanschauung.

In Beauvoir’s day, ‘many women were taught that their value was conditional upon being loved by men, girls were encouraged to conceive of themselves ‘as seen through the man’s eyes’, to fulfil men’s fantasies and help them pursue their projects rather than dream dreams or pursue projects of their own… [mistaking] the desire for love for love itself.’

Of course, it’s still deceptively easy for either sex fall into that trap, I fear, And yet, it was people like Beauvoir who helped us to understand that we create our own shadows. I suppose it’s never too late, but I wish I’d studied more about her than Sartre when I was young… although maybe you have to be old to really understand the wisdom, eh?

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Wast thou o’erlook’d, even in thy birth?

That Age can do some funny things to the mind seems fairly obvious. The accumulation of years, brings with it a panoply of experience that, hopefully, enables a kind of personalized Weltanschauung to emerge -things begin to sort themselves on the proper shelves, and even if they remain difficult to retrieve, there is a satisfaction that they are there, if not completely codified.

Of course, admixed with any elder ruminations are the ever-present intimations of imminent mortality -but it’s not that Age constrains the thought process to memento mori, so much as a flourishing of its antithesis: memento vivere. Age is a time for reflection about one’s life with a perspective from further up the hill.

And yet, for all the experiential input, there are two time frames hidden from each of us -what happens after death, is the obvious one to which most of us turn our attention as the final act draws to a close, but there is an equally shrouded area on which few of us spend any time: what, if anything, was preconceptual existence like? Is it the equivalent of death, perhaps minus the loss of an identity not yet acquired?

I wonder if it’s a subject more understandable to the very young, than the gnarled and aged. I remember the very first time I was taken to a movie theatre, somewhere around two or three years of age, I think. When I say ‘remember’, I mean to say I have only one recollection of the event: that of a speeding locomotive filmed in black-and-white from track level, and roaring over the camera. It was very exciting, but I remember my father being very puzzled when I confessed that I’d seen it before. I hadn’t, of course, as he patiently explained to me, and yet it seemed to me I’d seen the same thing years before.

No doubt it was my still-immature neurons trying to make sense of the world, but the picture seemed so intuitively obvious to me at the time. And through the years, the image has stayed with me, as snippets of childhood memories sometimes do, although with the meaning now sufficiently expurgated as to be innocuous, as well as devoid of any important significance.

And then, of course, there was the Bridey Murphy thing that was all the rage when I was growing up in the 1950ies. I read the book The Search for Bridey Murphy in my early teenage years about a Colorado woman, Virginia Tighe, who, under hypnotic regression in the early 1950ies, claimed she was the reincarnation of an Irish woman, Bridey Murphy from Cork in the 19th century. I even went to see the movie of the same name as the book. It was all pretty well debunked subsequently, but I suppose it was enough, at a tender age, to make me wonder about what might have happened before I become me.

At any rate, I am puzzled about why the seeming non-existence prior to conception is not something we think about more often. True, we would likely have no identity to put into that side of the equation, nor, for that matter, the loss of anything like friends or, well, existence, on the other, but still it is a comparable void. A wonderful mystery every bit as compelling as death.

I suppose the issue resurfaced for me a few years ago when I had a very vivid dream about our three-score-and-ten of existence. I saw myself as a bubble rising through some boiling water. While I was the bubble, I thought of myself as singular and not only separate from, but possessing an identity totally differentiated and unique from everything else around me. My life was the time it took me to rise to the surface. And yet when I arrived there, and my bubble burst and disappeared, when the me inside dissolved in the air from which I started, it all made sense. In fact, the encapsulated journey itself was an aberration, as was the idea of identity…

The dream lay fallow for several years and then reawakened, Phoenix-like, when I discovered an essay in the online publication Aeon, by Alison Stone, a professor of philosophy at Lancaster University in the UK. https://aeon.co/ideas/thinking-about-ones-birth-is-as-uncanny-as-thinking-of-death

‘Many people feel anxious about the prospect of their death,’ she writes. ‘Indeed, some philosophers have argued that death anxiety is universal and that this anxiety bounds and organises human existence. But do we also suffer from birth anxiety? Perhaps. After all, we are all beings that are born as well as beings that die… Once we bear in mind that we are natal as well as mortal, we see some ways in which being born can also occasion anxiety.’

I don’t believe she is thinking of what it must feel like to be born, so much as the transition from, well, the nothing before sperm and egg meet, to a something -to a somebody. She quotes the thoughts of the bioethicist David Albert Jones in his 2004 book The Soul of the Embryo: ‘We might be telling someone of a memory or event and then realise that, at that time, the person in front of us did not even exist! … If we seriously consider the existence and the beginning of any one particular human being … we realise that it is something strange and profound.’

Stone continues, ‘I began to exist at a certain point in time, and there is something mysterious about this. I haven’t always been there; for aeons, events in the world unfolded without me. But the transition from nonexistence to existence seems so absolute that it is hard to comprehend how I can have passed across it… To compound the mystery further, there was no single crossing point. In reality, we don’t begin in [a] sudden, dramatic way… Rather, I came into existence gradually. When first conceived, I was a single cell (a zygote). Then I developed a formed body and began to have a rudimentary level of experience during gestation. And once out of my mother’s womb, I became involved in culture and relationships with others, and acquired a structured personality and history. Yet the zygote that I began as was still me, even though it had none of this.’ Wow -you see what I mean?

Stone seems to think that all this is rather distressing, but I disagree. All I feel is a sense of profound, unbounded wonder at it all. Reflecting on that time-before-time is not unweaving the rainbow, as Keats was said to have accused Newton of doing because he had destroyed its poetry by actually studying it.

In fact, I’m reminded of something the poet Kahlil Gibran wrote: And when you were a silent word upon Life’s quivering lips, I too was there, another silent word. Then life uttered us and we came down the years throbbing with memories of yesterday and with longing for tomorrow, for yesterday was death conquered and tomorrow was birth pursued.

I have to believe there will still be poetry in the world -with or without us…

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Like madness, is the glory of this life

My grandmother was old when she died -very old, in fact: she died on the morning after her 100th birthday party. Her congratulatory letter from the Queen -or at least someone official claiming to speak for her highness- came the day before. I’m not so sure it was congratulations, really -more a recognition that a member of the United Kingdom, albethey an émigré, had still remained loyal to her majesty and her dominions for a century.

My grandmother seemed to enjoy the party we held for her -she was all smiles and although she also seemed a bit confused by it all, she was delighted by the letter. It spoke to her of another life, I think -one that whispered the secrets of a little girl growing up in an English seaside town with a shingled beach and an amusement pier that offered tempting glimpses of a world across the sea -a world she couldn’t know would become her own for most of her life.

We all have lives like that -the present we currently occupy pales in depth, in colour, and even in meaning to the worlds we have tasted in our incomparably longer past. It only seems appropriate that when our brains tire of sorting through the tyrannies of the moment, we default to the myriad memories of what we lived. The past can be a comfortable place to rest -familiar, at the very least.

I loved visiting my aging granny -even in the hospital where she spent her final days she was always full of stories, full of wisdom, and full of wonder. And although often confused about current events, or what she’d had for breakfast that morning, her eyes would light up when I asked her to tell me about, say, her train journey across the country when she and grampa first arrived in the boat from England.

She would chuckle when she told me of the pioneer stoves they used to cook their food enroute, and how each time the locomotive stopped to fill the water in its tank, everybody would make a mad dash from the railway coaches to find wood and occasional supplies from the little stations along the way. Her eyes would twinkle as she relived the flavours of whatever food they’d had, and she would laugh at the difficulty of cooking on the ever-moving stoves. She had no trouble remembering how everybody helped each other -she even remembered some of their names after more than eighty years.

So whenever she seemed confused at my visits or flustered by my questions about her health, I would smile and settle in a chair beside her and ask her what she remembered about ‘the old days’ as she decided to call them. After all, I think she lived there most of the time -it seemed a place where she was happy. At any rate, it seemed to calm her, and allow her to speak to me as if she were still in the summer garden she’d loved to show me on my visits years ago to the house she and her husband had built near Vancouver. There seemed to be no disorder in the garden, no anxious  search for a constantly fading identity, nothing forgotten there -just flowers all around us, and birds singing in the bower of trees she’d planted so long ago.

She loved to speak from there, and even then -especially then- I was happy to sit there with her in her past. I lived happily in the two worlds, and she enjoyed meeting me there; like lovers we would float from dream to dream, escaping from the bewildering clatter of a crowded hospital ward. Who would not prefer her floral ‘then’ to her sterile ‘here-and-now’?

The staff told me of the problems with her confusion, and how she would sometimes wander off looking, as she told one of them, ‘for the garden’. And all the while around us, there were often moans and shouts, and irritable reactions to attempts to tame the ward. Sanity lay somewhere in the past -their patients’ past- but the department seemed hastily conceived as a holding area until beds became available in community nursing homes. Hospital was perhaps the wrong place for most of the elders -they were not sick except, perhaps, for home… or for something that reminded them of home, at any rate.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised to come across an essay on retrieving the autobiographical memory of demented seniors in Aeon: https://aeon.co/ideas/the-self-in-dementia-is-not-lost-and-can-be-reached-with-care

It was written by Muireann Irish, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Sydney. ‘Our autobiographical memory… seems crucial to weaving a life story that bridges past and present, and permits us to extrapolate how the future might unfold, all within a meaningful and coherent narrative. So what happens when the tapestry of memory begins to fray, and we lose access to defining memories from the past?’

There are many types of neurodegenerative loss -Alzheimer’s among them, of course- and it is progressive. ‘Gradually, as the disease spreads, more distant memories are affected, leading to patchy recall of self-defining events, such as one’s wedding day or the birth of one’s children.’ And without our memories, who are we…? ‘There remains a recalcitrant perception that in parallel with the progressive pathological onslaught in the brain is the inevitable demise of personhood, akin to a ‘living death’.’

But, viewing dementia like that is not only depressing, but incomplete, according to the author. ‘While the illness is devastating, not all memories are obliterated by Alzheimer’s, and much of the person’s general knowledge and recollection of the distant past is retained. There remains a vast repository of life experiences, personal history, stories and fables that endures, even late into the illness. At moderate to severe stages of dementia, activities such as art, dance and music therapy provide important nonverbal means of communicating and fostering social interaction even when, on the surface, many core capabilities might seem to be lost… As the disease progresses and their self-concept becomes more rooted in their past, people with dementia can feel increasingly divorced from their current surroundings, which no longer make sense or feel familiar. This is the catalyst for behaviours that are commonly couched as ‘challenging’, such as agitation, wandering, attempts to leave a care facility to ‘go home’.’

Irish suggests that instead of confronting the dementia with an enforced ‘now’, ‘a positive approach could be to create a ‘memory box’ in anticipation of the days to come. This could form a repository of photographs, keepsakes, newspaper clippings, objects with personal meaning, even fabrics and smells, that resonate with the person and provide an external memory store. Conversations regarding music and songs from the person’s formative years, and the memories that these tunes evoke, could inspire personalised playlists that foster social interaction and the springboard for reminiscence. For care staff, a memory store of this nature would be as important as taking a detailed medical history.’

As for my grandmother, I was happy to sit with her in her garden while she happily regaled me with stories of her past. And I’d like to think that after she received that letter from her queen, she retreated to the garden to read it again and again as her life washed over her like a cooling summer breeze, and the flowers whispered sweet nothings in her ear.

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In scorn of Nature, Art gave lifeless life

Age is an artist that continues to paint experience after experience over the worn and tattered scenes that are no more. For most of us, however, the pentimento is obvious, and never quite disappears beneath the crust of what we insist on adding. And yet, we continue to paint in hopes we’ve got it right at last: that what we are now portraying is what we should have seen those many years ago. All the while, of course, the colours thicken on what we layered on before, adding nothing to our knowledge, only curtains that cast shadows on the canvas -the past no more than tricks of light.

And yet I’m beginning to suspect that there is more to Art than the depiction of long forgotten histories in words or canvas -far more, in fact. Art is the plaque in the cornerstone that reminds us of how things were, the figure-ground that taunts our hallowed view of present days -the stories that we have come to revere.

But we are, all of us, Art; we are the stories that we tell, and the ones that we have heard. We are what we have seen, however vaguely remembered, and parts of us are shadows that follow us around like memories.

So, it occurred to me that Art could function as a synergist: its effect is greater than might be expected from what it depicts. If nothing else, a painting -like an old photograph, perhaps- allows us to see what was and compare it with what is. Some difference is usually to be expected, I suppose, but if the change is sufficiently irreconcilable to our expectations, it may speak to those little ears within that are alert to dissonance. In other words, it may spur us to a conclusion, an action, that we may not have felt was either necessary or justified before: the past ‘screwing our courage to the sticking place’, to slightly paraphrase Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth.

I hasten to admit that my epiphany is far from original, but I was pleased to find a thorough examination of it in an essay in BBC Future written by Ella Saltmarshe and Beatrice Pembroke, the founders of the Long Time Project which ‘champions art and culture as a route to helping people think and act more long-term.’ https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190521-how-art-and-culture-can-help-us-rethink-time

‘For most of human history we haven’t needed to think long-term,’ they write. ‘” As futurist Jamais Casio puts it, “In a world of constant, imminent existential threats, the ability to recognise subtle, long-term processes and multi-generational changes wasn’t a particularly important adaptive advantage.” Yet today, the nature of risk has changed. We no longer live in a world of clear, local cause and effect, and the greatest threats to civilisation are happening on the timescale of decades or centuries.’ And yet, ‘While our minds might be not be wired to deal with long-term threats and priorities in the abstract, they are wired for two things that we can control: story and emotion… Art can stretch our time frames, helping us develop what geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls “timefulness”: the ability to locate ourselves within eras and aeons, rather than weeks and months.’

The authors go on to document the ‘growing body of deep time work that locates us in the epic geological history of the Universe, evoking awe and wonder.’ And it seems to me that such an approach may help to bridge the ever-widening gap between indifference and despair: the unwillingness to confront the existential threats that seem to be confronting us at every turn -from the paucity new antibiotics able to deal with increasing microbial resistance, the growing mistrust of vaccines in the face of overwhelming evidence for their efficacy, to the elephant looming in the dark, stuffy room of climate change. We are often so frightened by these, and other things, that we turn our heads away, and like children hiding under a blanket, think we have found a refuge from the elephant and his kin. But somewhere inside, we know we have solved nothing, and if we turn again to look, we find that it is staring at us still.

Sometimes, when things seem too remote for action, too unlikely to affect us, or worse, too horrible to contemplate, we benefit from intermediaries we trust to explain what we have failed to understand and to guide us through the fear. Change is normal, but only when it doesn’t colour outside the expected boundaries -then it turns to chaos. In the words of Shakespeare again -this time King Lear- that way madness lies; let me shun that. So, as the authors write: ‘If we can work with art and culture to stretch our time frames so that we care about the long-term future, then hopefully as a species, we will have a future in the long term.’

And sometimes, it is also the little things changing that we’re reluctant to face.

“Is that where you used to live, Grampa?” My 4 year old grandson stared at the picture I had shown him with a doubtful expression on his face. “Can we go and see it…?”

I could only smile at his enthusiasm. I was a child myself when I’d lived there and my parents had long since sold the house to developers, but at the time it was on a quiet, unsidewalked street lined with trees. Now, years later, it was lined with multi-storied apartment blocks and parked cars.

“It’s changed since then, Cas,” I explained. “And our house isn’t there anymore…”

“Where’d it go?” he asked, his face now puzzled.

My answer was a little shrug. In truth, I missed the house with its wide wooden steps and covered porch. It had trees in the front and back, and a garden where my mother used to grow vegetables that she’d preserve for the long, protracted winter season. I’d told Cas about it many times, but had only just found the grainy photograph for him to see.

“Is the street like our street now?” He ran to the front window of the little apartment his mother and my son were renting while they worked their way up their respective corporate ladders. I had agreed to babysit for the afternoon.

I walked over to the window and looked out with him; I had to nod my head. “Yes Cas, very much like this street.”

He stared out the window for a while, and as I started to walk away, he turned to me. “Why did you let them do it, Grampa?”

The question caught me by surprise. “Do what, Cas?”

“Tear down your beautiful house and take away the trees?”

I had to sigh. “I suppose my mommy and daddy were getting old and needed to move to some place smaller that was easier to take care of…” In fact, they were both gone now.

He thought about it for a moment. “Did their new house have trees and a garden, too?”

Cas seemed so earnest that I didn’t want to disappoint him. He’d never met his great-grandparents; he’d never had to endure their gradual decay in the extended care home in which they  ended up. So I nodded. “Yes, they moved to a place with trees and a little flower garden.”

A big smile suddenly appeared on his face and his eyes twinkled with pleasure. “That’s good,” he said, with a sudden adult expression on his little face. “My daddy says we’re going to move to a place with trees…” He glanced out of the window again. “Trees are important when you get old, aren’t they Grampa?”

They certainly are Cas, I thought and nodded with a sigh. Trees will always be important.

by

A thousand times goodnight

Am I working against the grain? Or is it just that I’m getting older? Unable to assimilate new situations quickly enough to form a useful opinion? I’d rather think of it as the wisdom of Age, but, of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I? And yet, the realization that first impressions are often premature impressions is something only acquired through experience, I suppose, because it’s difficult to shed the initial suspicion that you may have discovered something really important.

I’m pretty sure I have never formed friends like that -friendship (as opposed to acquaintanceship) is acquired slowly, and over time. And as to something akin to ‘love at first sight’, I can only say that for those kinds of feelings to last -at least on my part- they have to be reciprocated. That, too, takes time. ‘Attraction at first sight’ is another thing altogether, though -it is more superficial, and probably less demanding. Love is a deep -dare I say, spiritual– thing, whereas I think attraction sits more tenuously on the rather slippery surface of our attention.

Still, I recognize that as the years slowly thicken around me, they may have dampened the restless partner-seeking vibrissae to which younger, thinner skin is so exposed. I’m not sure that I am completely disqualified, but at least my muffled needs have allowed me time to reflect before deciding -to breathe, before seeking to envelop…

And yet, I remain curious, if not vicariously attracted to the issue of first impressions, so I just had to read the BBC story that promised to unwrap it like a bedtime story from long ago: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190401-is-there-such-a-thing-as-love-at-first-sight

In an essay for BBC by William Park, he writes that ‘There is evidence that we are able to make an assessment of someone’s attractiveness in the blink of an eye, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that those assessments are accurate… It takes less than 1/10th of a second to form an assessment of someone’s face. These first impressions predict all kinds of important characteristics, not just attractiveness.’ And, ‘These impressions we make in a split second are not random; they tend to be shared by the majority of the people surveyed. But it doesn’t necessarily make them correct. “A first impression could be misleading,” says professor Alexander Todorov [an academic at Princeton University]… “We only make first impressions about strangers. So naturally they are superficial.”’

‘Whether our predictions are accurate or not, we make them quickly and we stick to them. Even if we are given more time than 1/10th of a second to judge the attractiveness of a face, we are unlikely to arrive at a different conclusion… There are three universal qualities that people infer from a face: attractiveness, trustworthiness and dominance. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Attractiveness is a mating cue, trustworthiness implies useful social characteristics, like being able to care for children, and assessing dominance is useful to avoid conflict.’

So far, so good, I suppose -if a bit reductionist. But the essay goes on to suggest that we prejudge facial photos using the same categories and ‘portraits taken from a low angle are more likely to be judged as dominant, which is positive for men and negative for women. Whereas the reverse is seen in portraits taken from a high angle.’ -so, my first clue as to what kind of picture to put on a dating site, I guess. But there is a catch: ‘In dating apps, it is a case of love at second sight. When asked to rate the attractiveness of potential partners, if the preceding face was attractive you are more likely to rate the next face as attractive and vice versa.’

Well, that confirms my suspicion that online first impressions are such stuff as dreams are made on. ‘First impressions are rapid but shallow and mutable if you have better information.’ You have to talk to somebody, engage with them to sustain something more than a passing interest. And then, of course, it is no longer a ‘first’ impression. But, I’m only reiterating what Todorov  believes: ‘“The only way to tell whether two people will really like each other – they have to talk. People don’t make good predictions for compatibility without talking,” says Professor Todorov.’

Uhmm… I have to say that I began to lose interest at that point. I began to wonder, as I pointed out earlier, whether the essay was more about attraction, than love. It’s easy to get them mixed up in the soup of hormones in which we swim. In many ways, the article was a ‘how to’ for the young and restless. I was more intrigued by something  Park points out in the dying embers of his article when he quotes a professor of psychology from California State University, Los Angeles, Karen Wu. ‘Wu studies dating behaviours in Asian-American communities who put a different emphasis on certain values… “Western cultures value individual goals more than group goals. Collectivistic cultures might value niceness more because you’re interested in group benefits rather than individual benefits.”

In other words, ‘Considering this, it is a miracle that we ever find someone who is as attracted to us as we are to them. The conversation your potential partner had directly before meeting you, their general mood, their cultural background, the angle at which they are looking at you, whether they deem themselves to be more popular than you – all these factors could influence whether you hit it off seems endless.’

So, is it any wonder that Age seems like a vacation at the cottage? No compulsion to drive somewhere, and then get up the next day and drive someplace else. No need to worry about the angle from which you take your selfies, or whether the next individual who wanders past is judging you by the standards of the person with whom they last talked.

These all seem like minor things in the bigger picture, and yet they loom large in the quest for partnership, I suppose. Attractiveness, trustworthiness and dominance -is that what we’re expected -okay, designed– to glean from the first glance without even needing to break the ice with a smile or a kind word? Biologic atavisms, if you ask me… although I am seldom canvassed for that kind of opinion anymore. I’m not sure why.

by

Death, Thou shalt Die

Just when you think that Age has afforded you a full panoply of experience, another one comes along that you are forced to fit into the bookcase. It may be sufficiently unique as to require an entirely new shelf, but more likely, it will be something so obvious that you’re embarrassed you hadn’t thought of it before, and can squeeze it in beside another thing you’ve already read.

The internet does stuff like that -to me anyway. Permutations and combinations of issues I had always believed were immutably fixed in time and space unravel at warp speed making me question the wisdom of any assumptions it was thought safe to trust when I was growing up.

Like Death, for example. It used to be that after someone died, all that remained were memories, and perhaps a few of their possessions. ‘Dead and gone’ was a relatively intuitive reality in those days; ‘Dead and present’ was an oxymoron. Now, most of us have digital feet that continue to walk the screen no matter our corporeal substance. And, apart from the nuisance algorithms that track me from app to app, I had not given those footfalls much thought -until, that is, I came across an article in the Conversation on digital grieving by Jo Bell, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Hull: https://theconversation.com/how-the-internet-is-changing-the-way-we-grieve-100134

She writes that ‘These days the dead are now forever present online and digital encounters with someone who has passed away are becoming a common experience. […] Each one of us has a digital footprint – the accumulation of our online activity that chronicles a life lived online through blogs, pictures, games, web sites, networks, shared stories and experiences. When a person dies, their “virtual selves” remain out there for people to see and interact with. These virtual selves exist in the same online spaces that many people use every day.’

When I first thought about this -the idea of inadvertently coming across someone, or something from whoever had died- I worried about the effect, and how I would react. But, as the author reports, ‘Yet for some, these spaces have become a valuable tool – especially so for the bereaved. An emerging body of research is now looking at the ways the internet, including social media and memorial websites, are enabling new ways of grieving – that transcend traditional notions of “letting go” and “moving on”.’

I was, of course, aware of the concept and probable value of memorials, but I have to confess that I hadn’t thought of them in terms of lasting online tributes. To be sure, I was weaned in another epoch when, apart from an obituary notice in the local paper, or flowers on a tombstone, there were precious few options to show that you remembered someone. But, of course, people today use the modalities they are used to.

Suicide is a devastating act, not only for the victim, but especially for those who are left behind. It makes sense that the friends would need to process the act as best they could. ‘For many mourners, the most important motivating factor seems to be the need to stay connected to the deceased and to “keep them alive”. And keeping a Facebook page going by actively maintaining the “in life” profile of the deceased, or creating a new “in memorial” profile, allows users to send private or public messages to the deceased and to publicly express their grief. […] The use of social media in this way goes some way towards answering the question of where to put one’s feelings – such as love, grief, guilt – after a death. And many people turn to the same sites to promote awareness raising and fund raising for various charities in memory of their loved ones.’

‘Unlike sentimental objects, social media pages and online spaces allow people to explore grief with others from the comfort of their own home. Talking to people online can also help to free up some of the inhibitions that are otherwise felt when talking about loss – it enables forms of uncensored self-expression that are not comparable with face-to-face conversations.’ Indeed, as they evolve, perhaps ‘online memorial sites and social networking spaces help the bereaved to see how events in the past can continue to have value and meaning in the present and the future.’

I was sitting in a dark corner of my usual Starbucks a few weeks ago thinking more of shadows than of death, when a couple of middle aged women sat down at the next table. Normally, I wouldn’t have paid them much heed, but one of them, a rather buxom lady was wearing a loose white turtle neck sweater that kept snagging one of her hoop earrings. Still waiting for my sausage-and-egg breakfast sandwich to cool, I have to admit I was searching for a divertissement, and her ear seemed as good as any.

‘I visited Krissy again today, Helen,” she said matter-of-factly to her similarly attired and equally Rubenesque friend.

Helen looked up from her still steaming espresso macchiato “That’s nice, dear. Anything new?”

Her friend shrugged and cuddled her cinnamon dolce latte in two serviettes folded to dissipate the heat, I suppose. “Well, a few others must have visited her earlier, because I saw some collars, and a milk bone…”

Helen nodded, but she sat back a little in her chair and left the macchiato to cool in front of her. I could see her staring at her friend, even in the dim light. “Julie, it’s been, what, two months since…”

“Seventy-eight days,” Julie interrupted her with an intensity that made me wonder if her latte had just burned through the napkins.

Helen nodded sympathetically and reached over the table to stroke Julie’s free hand. “I know dear… but…”

“But Krissy loves the attention, don’t you think?” Julie sighed at the thought.

“Loved, Julie. Loved…” Helen corrected her gently, and I could see her begin to stroke her friend’s wrist.

Julie’s face suddenly winced as her earring grappled with her sweater once again.

Helen seemed to think it was more than a simple entanglement. “There comes a time when you have to let her pass, dear,” she said, and squeezed Julie’s hand before letting it go.

“You mean take it down, don’t you…?” There was a look of desperation in Julie’s eyes, although in the shadows it was difficult to be sure. “But people are still leaving bones…” She was almost pleading now.

Helen smiled and reached across the table again, but Julie was already standing up.

“I… I need some air, Helen,” she said stiffly and began to walk away.

Helen shook her head slowly, gulped down her macchiato, and rose to follow her out of the door.

My breakfast sandwich seemed pleasantly warm in the sudden silence, so I took an experimental bite and sat back in my chair to enjoy it. For some things, I realized as I chewed contentedly, memory is enough. I felt no need to Facebook the disappearing sausage and egg…

 

 

 

 

by

The Centre Cannot Hold

Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…  Remember that poem by Yeats? I thought he was exaggerating. Using poetic licence to make a point. But sometimes things can feel like that. Sometimes the world turns on its head and the expected order is reversed.

I dread the tidal bore of malls, the rushing mass of strangers pushing and shoving, strutting and fretting their times upon their internal stages; I hate the food ‘courts’ in malls even more, though. I’m not sure if it’s the smell of cheap food, or the Brownian movement of those who treat the ceremony of meals with disdain -but, like some parts of the city, they are places in extremis. Waypoints for some, perhaps -abrasions for others…

And yet, when all the usual shopping center seats for tired old men in the busy causeway are occupied, the courts are a form of sanctuary, if not salvation, I suppose. At any rate, the other day, exhausted by an already hard swim against an increasingly turbulent current of shoppers as noon approached, I found myself beached on the shores of a particularly chaotic food court.

I tried not to examine it too closely -I was only seeking temporary refuge, after all- but it is difficult not to be drawn into the drama constantly evolving all around it. Like the old woman with the grocery bag precariously balanced on the seat of the walker she had wrapped in front of her like a shield. She pushed it in little steps, presumably intent on threading her way through the roiling masses to one of the food stalls, but with little progress through the flotsam that surrounded her. People all around her waded past, seemingly blind or just indifferent to her distress, and I could see the frustration on her face as she made it beyond the boundaries of my seat.

Dressed in purple pleated slacks, and a white frilly blouse, she had draped a long black coat over a portion of the walker near her groceries. I imagine she was hot, because I could see little beads of sweat glistening on her forehead but her short silvered hair was still neatly combed and barely disturbed, and she continued pushing her way through the crowd with arms of steel.

I was about to offer her my seat, when an unexpected space materialized in front of her and she jogged into it like being sucked into a vacuum. Suddenly, someone else with the same idea knocked the groceries off the walker and the contents rolled onto the floor in all directions. A few feet noticed and hands picked up an apple here, or an onion there, but by and large, things disappeared like mice in a forest. The person who’d caused it, a middle-aged woman with in jeans, and a soiled grey sweat-shirt, was clearly embarrassed at blundering into a frail old lady in a walker and dropped to her knees to retrieve what she could, apologizing profusely.

The table right beside mine cleared, and the two of them sat down at it as the older lady restocked her bag and the younger scanned the floor for remnants.

Still concerned that she might have injured the elderly woman, she blushed and seemed uncertain how to make amends. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I…” she stammered.

“Leslie,” the older lady interrupted. “It’s Leslie, and thank you for your help. Some of these walkers have design flaws, don’t you think?”

“Mine’s Denise,” the other woman responded, obviously relieved. Then she looked at the walker and laughed. “I’ve never really seen one of these up close,” she added. “Quite the invention, eh?”

Leslie glanced at her new friend and smiled. “The physios put you in one of these if you break your hip and they figure you’re too old for crutches. They think everybody over eighty has balance problems… Anyway, I only use it when I come to the mall.”

Denise looked at her with new respect. “You broke your hip?”

Leslie shrugged. “Stuff happens, eh?”

“Look, you stay right here and I’ll get you something at the counter.” She rummaged around in her pocket with a worried look on her face. “What do you want?”

Leslie smiled, guessing her friend was probably between pay cheques. “Oh thank you,” she said, in obvious appreciation. “I was just going to have a cup of tea,” she said and pulled a $20 bill out of the little purse hanging from her shoulder. “And you get yourself something, too, Denise.”

I watched Denise thread herself expertly through the tumultuous crowd like an otter weaving through storm-tossed seaweed. I thought Leslie was being a bit too trusting, but then again, I was interested to see what Denise might buy for herself -if she returned.

She did return, though, and she made it back to the table in record time, balancing a cup of tea with its little tale tell string hanging from the lip, a soft drink and two huge slices of pizza on a tray. Impressive really.

Leslie reacted to her arrival as if there’d never been any question of return. As if she’d merely sent a friend on a mission.

“Thanks, Denise,” she said as the tray arrived.

“I… I didn’t know whether you liked pizza…” She looked down at the two slices, and handed Leslie the change. “I got two different kinds, so you could choose,” she said hopefully.

The smile on Leslie’s face grew. “Thank you dear. That was sweet of you, but I had a big breakfast this morning before I left. You go ahead and eat them both if you’d like.”

Denise was obviously hungry, but I could tell she was trying to pretend she wasn’t. She gulped down the soft drink, though -as if she couldn’t really help herself.

Leslie sipped her tea, pretending not to notice her friend’s discomfort. “Please eat. Don’t mind me. I’m just enjoying my little rest.”

A little hesitantly Denise chose the lumpy slice, but once it neared her mouth, she couldn’t restrain herself, and it quickly disappeared. She was about to repeat the performance when she suddenly gasped and her face began to turn blue. Her eyes looked as if they might even leave their sockets as she fought to take a breath.

Leslie was on her feet in a moment, and dragged Denise upright from behind. She reached around her waist, compressed her abdomen just below the ribs and squeezed. Denise coughed once and took a deep, stertorous breath.

By now, people had gathered around them, not certain what to think, but it was a classic, perfectly executed Heimlich maneuver. I could see the onlookers glance at each other in admiration.

When Denise had recovered enough to breathe normally, and the people had dispersed, she stared at what she had thought was a frail old woman with a surprised look on her face. “What did…?”

“Once a nurse, always a nurse, Denise” she interrupted, as if it didn’t really require an explanation.

“But…”

Leslie stopped the question with a smile. “She hath borne herself beyond the promise of her age, doing, in the figure of a lamb, the feats of a lion.”

“What…?”

Denise seemed confused, but Leslie merely shrugged and her eyes twinkled mischievously. “Never mind me, dear -I’m just misquoting a line from Shakespeare…”

Denise thought about it for a moment, and then a smile suddenly appeared on her face.  “It’s from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, isn’t it…?”

The two of them giggled like little girls.

I couldn’t help but chuckle with them, and I remembered another line from that poem of Yeats: the ceremony of innocence is drowned…

by

Life would not yield to Age

There are times I think I’ve missed out on a lot. It seems to me that in my day, if a man re-chose a woman, he would almost always go for someone younger than himself. The reasons were obvious even then: overweening hubris, and expectations beyond capability. Indeed, dating sites online still seem to confirm my impression, and often -if not usually- the man’s eyes prove bigger than his stomach and the meal seldom lasts.

But retrospection is a stew of disappointments often sprinkled with only the barest soupçon of hope. Age is, well, age after all, and things happen as we get older. So, especially if one partner is significantly younger when they meet, the inevitable will occur -and worsen- in the older, and so you can guess who will become the default caretaker. Despite the best and most honourable intentions, this strikes me as unfair, albeit easily predictable by anyone watching from the sidelines.

And yet, although I concede that I am a creature of my era, I am still willing to be a witness to the triumph of hope over experience, so I was drawn to an article written by Gary Karantzas, an associate professor in Social Psychology/Relationship Science, at Deakin University (Australia) in the Conversation online magazine: https://theconversation.com/mind-the-gap-does-age-difference-in-relationships-matter-94132?

‘Across Western countries, about 8% of all heterosexual married couples can be classified as having a large age gap (ten years or more). These generally involve older men partnered with younger women. About 1% of age-gap couples involve an older woman partnered with a younger man. About 25% of male-male unions and 15% of female-female unions demonstrate a large age gap.

‘But what these trends tell us is that the majority of the population is likely to partner with someone of similar age. This largely has to do with having social circles that generally include peers of similar ages and being attracted to others who are similar. Similarity entails many things, including personality, interests and values, life goals and stage of life, and physical traits (age being a marker of physical appearance).’

If the article had stopped there I imagine I would have learned nothing new, and I might have remained an insufferable avocat du diable at dinner parties. But, fortunately for both me and my friends, I read further. ‘Many people assume that age-gap couples fare poorly when it comes to relationship outcomes. But some studies find the relationship satisfaction reported by age-gap couples is higher. These couples also seem to report greater trust and commitment and lower jealousy than similar-age couples. Over three-quarters of couples where younger women are partnered with older men report satisfying romantic relationships.

‘A factor that does impact on the relationship outcomes of age-gap couples is their perceptions of social disapproval. That is, if people in age-gap couples believe their family, friends and wider community disapprove of their union, then relationship commitment decreases and the risk of break-up increases. These effects appear to apply to heterosexual and same-sex couples.’

‘Another factor at play may have to do with the stage of life each partner is experiencing. For instance, a ten-year gap between a 20-year-old and a 30-year-old may bring up different challenges and issues than for a ten-year gap where one partner is 53 and the other is 63. This is because our lives are made up of different stages, and each stage consists of particular life tasks we need to master. And we give priority to the mastery of different tasks during these distinct stages of our lives.’

And he concludes that ‘The success of a relationship depends on the extent to which partners share similar values, beliefs and goals about their relationship; support each other in achieving personal goals; foster relationship commitment, trust and intimacy; and resolve problems in constructive ways. These factors have little do with age.’

I think I witnessed something like that once. I don’t normally sit on benches, especially occupied ones, even though they’re usually long enough to support a small family. Of course, maybe that’s the idea, because they often have little plaques commemorating someone who has died but used to sit there. So I feel a little uncomfortable sitting beside people who might be related to the deceased. And anyway, the act of sitting on a bench at my age makes me think I should be finding an unplaqued one so my own family can have one printed up.

But, I was tired and the bench that overlooked Vancouver’s English Bay was seductive, even though two people had already discovered it for a rather snuggly chat. They were both gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes and speaking softly to each other. I sat at the far end of the seat so I wouldn’t disturb them. I don’t think it bothered either of them particularly, although one of them, an attractive woman, probably in her early sixties, leaned even closer to her friend to whisper something when I sat down. I have trouble judging ages, but I would think he was  ten or fifteen years her junior, and yet equally enthralled. Anyway, both of their eyes were so entangled I might as well have been a bird sitting on a branch nearby for all they seemed to care.

And then, perhaps thinking they were being rude, they both sat back and stared at the waves breaking on the nearby rocks for a moment. Finally, the woman turned to me and smiled. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she asked, as if she suddenly felt a need to welcome me to their bench.

I nodded pleasantly, and we all sat in silence for a while, listening to the cry of a group of seagulls that had landed on the rocks. “I hope I didn’t disturb you,” I suddenly blurted out, embarrassed at choosing an already occupied bench, I suppose, although perhaps more concerned about admitting to myself that I had needed to rest.

The man leaned forward and his eyes circled around my cheeks like butterflies about to settle. “Not at all. We were just reminiscing about how we met on this very bench fifteen years ago -fifteen years ago today, in fact.”

“I’d just finished running around the seawall, and I think it was a bit too far for me, so I needed to sit down… And I happened to see this bench,” the woman said, squeezing his hand as she spoke. She glanced at her friend. “Jeff was…”

“I was sitting at the far end of the bench reading a book when Alice arrived, and…”

“And that was the beginning of a wonderful life,” she finished for him.

It was sweet the way they both finished sentences for each other -like they were completely comfortable being inside the other’s head.

“It’s our fourteenth wedding anniversary today,” he added, and kissed her gently on the cheek.

“We come to this bench each year to remember,” she said snuggling closer to him and sighing contentedly.

“Welcome to our bench, eh?” he chuckled, and winked at her as they both stood up and stretched.

“I’m sorry, I hope I didn’t…” I started to say, but she reached out and clasped my hand, her eyes twinkling in the sunlight for a moment.

“It’s the meeting bench,” Jeff said, hugging her as he spoke, then grasping her free hand he stood quietly with her for a moment, the wind tussling their hair like another hand.

And as they started to walk away, Alice turned towards me and her eyes softened as they rested on my face. “I hope someone sits…”

But just then some friends further down the seawall waved and yelled at them, and her smile caressed me briefly before she shrugged and walked away with Jeff to grace some other lives.