Tag Archives: #aging

Memory and Story

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When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past (William Shakespeare)

A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity…(Oliver Sacks)

Much is made of the way in which memory erodes among the elderly – a group to which I am beginning to concede that I belong. Memory loss is considered normal, and it is true that my ability to recall information – the name of a restaurant that I loved in New York in 1970 or even the names of some of my childhood friends – is not immediate.  Now, my husband and I say that we are lucky to have two brains, which allows us to come up with a missing piece of information sooner.  Sometimes I kick myself when it is some simple, common word that has, slipped my mind.  Slipped my mind – memory is such a slippery thing indeed.

Recent research suggests that the slipperiness that I (and most of my friends) are experiencing is not the whole story.  We may have mild forgetfulness, but we are actually wiser:

“Some brain areas, including the hippocampus, shrink in size. …These changes can affect your ability to encode new information into your memory and retrieve information that’s already in storage. On the other hand… connections between distant brain areas strengthen. These changes enable the aging brain to become better at detecting relationships between diverse sources of information, capturing the big picture, and understanding the global implications of specific issues.” Harvard Health Newsletter

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This may be comforting to some people, but memory is still important to me —  Not the name of a restaurant, but the people who were there, the conversations we had that made us laugh, and how the evening created a friendship and endured for years.  I want to be able to summon up not just the grief that I felt at my mother’s funeral and any wisdom that I may have acquired about how to anticipate and live within grief (wisdom?), but also to remember that my cousin Butch played “When the Saints Go Marching In”, what words were spoken by whom, and even what I wore.  I want both to feel it very specifically AND to connect it to other events of loss in my life.  But I can’t remember what I wore….yet. 

The older I am, the more memories I carry and the more I need to make sense of these past events, feelings and images in the context of my life today.  This is what the practice of telling our story, whether orally, by journaling, or in a memoir, is about.  Oliver Sacks argues that “Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” But given my capacity to invent a past out of whole cloth, I have to work hard to prevent my story from being fiction!  In addition to reconnecting with past feelings – anger, grief, lust, joy – I want to give them additional color, and come closer to something real, with specifics. 

Recently, Karen Storm and I attended a writer’s retreat, where we planned to spent a chunk of our writing time working on the Karensdescant blog.  Instead, I woke up before the workshop feeling unnerved and vaguely remembering events from decades ago. By the time I got to our idyllic hermitage, I knew that I had to write about it – but my memories were fuzzy and still unsettling.  Karen Storm came with a less clear idea of what she might want to noodle on in addition to the blog, but was struck on the first evening with two old memories of her own that called her. 

In the end, we never talked about Karensdescant.  But we both happened on something more important – something that those increasing, branching, interlinked dendrites in our brains – the privilege of being old – demanded we attend to.  We wrote like maniacs, multiple pages infused with both tender and crushing details about important events falling into our computers,  connecting past events and people and finding new links with our present lives.  We were recalling information, pulling out succulent details that were not immediately at our fingertips, and making new stories out of past circumstances. 

In my case, it was clear that my memory of a very old relationship was encapsulated in a very short story that that I repeated so often, both to myself and others, that it seemed to be as real as the door to a room or a book on a shelf:  “We met and loved in wonderful places.  But it was too complicated.  It ended.”  But there’s the rub:  when I open the door to a room in my mind, I am amazed at what lies behind it that is unexpected – or what isn’t there that I was sure that I put away a short time ago.  When I open a book to reread it, there are sections that I don’t remember, while others that I starred on the first reading no longer seem as important as they did.  Anna Karenina is like that for me – it has a different meaning in every decade of my life.

It is not that my memories about that particular relationship are especially elusive – it’s the details that I have left out because they were (deliberately?) buried, or seemed trivial, that demanded some major rewriting. The editing included dredging up more information, but also a desire to make sense of old, lost relationships in the context of the life that I have subsequently woven, together with many others who I did not know or were not yet born, in the decades since.

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During the retreat, I wrote a different narrative that is much longer and has changed the way that I think, not only about that relationship, but all of my relationships with people  I have loved. This was not the Shakespeare of Sonnet 30, who descends into rather weepy nostalgia, but an urge to reorder my house to see that old things that still intrigue me are put into places where they connect with others parts of my life.  I can almost feel the dendrites communicating with each other. 

Friends who have worked with hospice patients talk about how they observe people holding on for a few more days to make sense of some aspect of their life that feel unfinished.  When I ask myself (or am asked) to remember more details, I find connections that I did not make in the past.  Or, I remember something that was said that changes the way I need to tell the story. What is different for many of us as we age is feeling a need to make sense of our lives more deliberately, with more care, whether we are writers, talkers, or scrapbookers.  When it comes down to it, we are all just trying to make a little more sense of this very non-linear project that is life.

Curiouser and Curiouser….

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–          Alice in Wonderland illustration by Arthur Rackham (1907) [Public Domain

Grown-ups never understand anything or themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them (Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince)

A few weeks ago, someone quoted from Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart: “Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty”.  Brown goes on to associate curiosity with discomfort:  “We have to admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn’t be asking.” Later, Brown links curiosity with the perception of an information gap that we commit to closing.   I immediately bristled – internally, since it would have been inappropriate to react to the nodding of heads and pervasive affirmation in the group. 

When I was a young child – and even when I was old enough to read them myself – two of my most beloved books were Alice in Wonderland and The House at Pooh Corner.  I read them joyfully to my children – and later to my grandchildren.  What I cherish about both of them is their exploration of simple, uncomplicated curiosity.  Alice hesitates only briefly before biting, although she knows that “one side will make you smaller, the other will make you large”, while the doorknob says “nothing’s impossible.”  Pooh looks at every day as a fresh adventure, whether it is confronting the loss of Eeyore’s tail or stalking the mysterious Heffalump.  While Alice sometimes bemoans a choice she has made, she quickly picks herself up and asks another impertinent question.  Pooh, on each day’s adventure, only hopes that there will be honey involved.

Curiosity may involve a risk, but it is not something that holds either Alice or Pooh back – more than momentarily.  Eeyore reminds us that worrying about not knowing – at least more than briefly – can be a path to cynicism and depression.  I took this lesson to heart:  Be curious.  Move on with the adventures.  Don’t do anything potentially life-threatening, but assume that the jams that you get in to will be temporary.  Don’t think about the “information gap” but move toward the unknown.  In other words, nurture the impulse to try stuff, and a full range of emotions that encompasses trepidation, but also the delight that comes with doing or learning about something new.

It turns out that Brown is talking to people who feel “stuck” in a comfort zone.  She covers all the research that says that we will be happier and freer if we respond to “I don’t really know” with curiosity. We all get stuck sometimes….certainly, retirement for someone like me, who loved going to work, meant that I had to allow myself to drive past the exit for my office without feeling lost and uncomfortable!  And although many routines nurture us (brushing our teeth, eating lunch, going to bed at roughly the same time on most days), it is easy to slip into ways of thinking and habits that constrain.  But getting stuck seems to be something that we choose more and more often as we exit adolescence.  With Alice, Pooh, and Thich Nhat Han as guides, however, we see that embracing vulnerability (which Brown endorses) is not a conscious decision to endure discomfort, but a practice of anticipating novelty and adventure – of embracing childish wonder and a Beginner’s Mind.  

And then there is the spiritual side.  One version of Genesis situates our humanness in “original curiosity”:  “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit…”  Albert Einstein echoes this, suggesting that “curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality…Never lose a holy curiosity.”  Julia Cameron also argues that curiosity is a spiritual path rather than a cognitive decision, and that it requires habits – she suggests random writing in “morning pages”, scheduled “artist dates” to explore a new esthetic, and regular walks that have no purpose other than to look deeply at whatever is in one’s path. 

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I admit that I don’t do these as consistently as I once anticipated, but I have other habits that invoke the same opportunity to approach the world with a Pooh-like sense of wonderment.  Meditation – something that for years I thought that was beyond my capacities – clears my brain of monkey-mind, and creates space for hope that goes beyond ticking off items on the incessant to-do list.  Connecting every week with someone (or several people) who are willing to engage in authentic and vulnerable conversations about “big stuff” never fails to make me curious.

Of course, I take Brene Brown’s assertions about the benefits of curiosity to heart because it is particularly important as we age.  According to Henry Emmons and David Alter’s 9 Keys To Staying Sharp, curiosity comes only a few steps behind the basics of moving, eating well, and getting enough sleep in warding off mental decline.  Nor do I want to ignore Brown’s s admonitions against getting too comfortable and avoiding vulnerability.  If I am always afraid of falling, will I ever learn how to skip again?  However, I also note that as we age we can more easily choose to embrace vulnerability and become more playful, as long as we are willing to follow Shel Silverstein and  “grow down” (along with giving away our business attire and our mother’s china):

He got his trousers torn and stained,

He ran out barefoot in the rain,

Shouting to all the folks in town,

“It’s much more fun, this growin’ down.

 — Shel Silverstein

Yet another threshold

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Photo by Max Harlynking on Unsplash

Too many people see the years beyond 70 as a static period in which there is little change, just a slowing down. But in Anam Cara, John O’Donohue encourages us to “visualize the mind as a tower of windows”:

Sadly, many people remain trapped at the one window, looking out every day at the same scene in the same way. Real growth is experienced when you draw back from that one window, turn, and walk around the inner tower of the soul and see all the different windows that await your gaze. Through these different windows, you can see new vistas of possibility, presence, and creativity

I have had to look through a lot of windows recently, and ones that I would not have chosen. However, although the paths taken have not been easy, each was part of a different journey in which I learned something about myself. Recently, someone asserted that my life was “really hard.” My immediate internal response was intense irritation, but I politely noted that my life was not so hard—after all, bad things happen to everyone. I quickly realized that I was annoyed because the kindly offered words did not acknowledge that I was grateful for the many blessings that accompanied the view from each unchosen and unanticipated window.

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By now, you’re probably wondering who is this person. I am a social scientist who is always gathering data and extrapolating from those data. I am also a deeply spiritual person, so I have the tendency to infuse my experiences—which might, on the surface, look ordinary—with spiritual meaning to deepen my understanding of our lives during these challenging times.

As we age, many of us view our lives as a series of milestones and thresholds that are usually clothed in ritual. For some, a milestone marks the completion or culmination of something (e.g., college degree, wedding anniversary, retirement, death of a loved one, etc.), whereas a threshold signals the commencement or start of something (e.g., wedding, career or life transition, relocation, etc.). Crossing a new threshold is always a challenge and requires a certain amount of trust.

Nearly three years ago, for example, I said goodbye to my late husband, Jerry. This was not how the two of us had envisioned growing old together. Instead, I was called to do such difficult, intense, and sacred work as Jerry’s primary caregiver for seven years…and now that work was over—a major milestone for me. Shortly thereafter, I crossed a threshold and slowly embarked on a journey of grieving—a journey made more complicated by the COVID restrictions.

Fast-forward 15 months. My journey of more-or-less solitary grieving ended abruptly—a milestone for me—when a routine blood test revealed chronic leukemia. Even though I still had more grieving to do, the social scientist in me volunteered to participate in a 15-month clinical research trial—another threshold and a healing journey for me in the company of dedicated caregivers/researchers.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

Along the way, I encountered two unplanned pauses when nasty falls resulted in broken bones in both of my hands, my wrist, and later my kneecap. In each case, I was forced to slow down even more and give my body the time it still needed to heal. Because, on both occasions, I needed to be cared for more intensely, I joined a larger group of elderly people who were no longer able to live independently. This was, for me, a very new journey into vulnerability and community.

Gratefully, my disease is now in remission and my bones are healing—a milestone for me—and I can begin to allow myself to look through new windows at possible future thresholds. Unlike the thresholds of the last decade that I could not ignore, this time I get to decide which doors and thresholds I will open and cross.

John O’Dononue offers this blessing for “a new beginning”:

Awaken your spirit to adventure,

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

— To Bless the Space between Us

Although I’ve faced many (sometimes abrupt) beginnings in my life, I’m still not comfortable being vulnerable—or not knowing what comes next. Here are the questions that now consume my anticipated re-entry into a “new normal”: How can I take all that I’ve learned over these challenging years and choose among “all the different windows” that await my gaze? How can I make sure that the threshold I am about to cross will nurture my well-being and resilience? And, perhaps most critical, what might be holding me back?

Photo by Les Argonautes on Unsplash

I now can see that I will not have answers to these questions before it is time for me to step gingerly across yet another threshold as it appears in this wild journey called life. To avoid stasis and “just a slowing down,” I must be content to make a choice and, in the words of Jan Richardson, writer, artist, and ordained Methodist minister, “Let what comes, come.”

BEGIN AT THE END?

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Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash

Planning is only the ego’s decision to be anxious now. ~Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself

Beginning with the end in mind is, for many people, the 13th commandment.  It is the second of Franklin Covey’s “7 habits of highly effective people”  and assumes that we need to be goal directed.  One business consulting website, for example, argues that each person needs to be able to articulate what they want but also:  What is the purpose of what I’m trying to achieve? What outcomes do I want? Why are these outcomes important/valuable?  While it appears that we are being asked about our principles, the underlying message is that effective people lead their lives according to one or more value-driven plans. But I don’t have such a plan and I never have had one.  So where does that leave me? 

Of course my assertion that I lived a goal-free life is an overstatement.  One example:  I knew early – before college — that I wanted to work with people in other countries.  I had no firm idea of what that would do for me but felt a persistent curiosity about places where assumptions about “how we do things around here” were different.  So I worked tirelessly to find opportunities, especially those where someone else might foot part of the cost.  My efforts worked out well:  I met many people who are still important to me and never felt that my time in strange airports and out-of-the-way countries was wasted.  But the goal of becoming what my husband calls “International Karen” was vague, guided by questions about what I might learn and how that might change me.  It required instinctive rather than logical responses to opportunities. Being curious helped when I accepted (for instance) an out-of-the-blue invitation to review a teacher education program in Azerbaijan, a country about which I knew almost nothing (another “I work for airfare” opportunity).   Paul Coelho asserts in The Alchemist, “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieving it”.  But every encounter increased my questions and my longing rather than a sense of closing in on a goal. 

Longing for something (like becoming  International Karen) is not the same as having a goal.   A defined “end in mind” has some clarity, but longing is, for me, often shapeless and imprecise, shifting with accumulating experiences.  And that has become more so as I get older. 

I still long to live in another country (again) but need to balance that against the fact that Dan, whose company consistently grounds and delights me, does not share that longing.  I have a persistent fantasy about a tiny home in Georgia O’Keefe’s scrubby New Mexico landscape, with its unique amalgam of Gringo, Spanish, and Indigenous cultures, but am reminded that living hours from good medical care is unwise, much less coping with the an off-the-grid lifestyle and the lack of neighbors.  I play with more realistic versions of one aspect of this longing–silence and a particular kind of nature–in a glamping version of Nomadland.  Then I remember that I want to spend more time with my grandchildren, who are neither silent nor located in New Mexico. 

In other words, the inherent dilemmas between the experiences and relationships that I want are increasingly apparent.  As my wise older friend Larry often said, “I can do almost anything I really want, but not everything I really want.”  Longing is an element of my primal need to keep reshaping my life, balanced against other realities. I must keep examining my longing and what it is telling me….it is a voice speaking to me rather than having an end in mind.  I may long for multiple, incompatible futures, knowing that they express something of my heart’s desire.  But I only need to think about the more near-term future, which may mean trading off Nomadland in New Mexico for Christmas with family in Boston.  But longing is also never satisfied; there is no end to most of my dreams.  When I published my first book, I didn’t achieve an end – instead I peered into a whole new world in which I could think about and use words in ways that would give me pleasure (and maybe do something for others as well).

There is another, but decidedly non-Covey approach that is increasingly appealing as I (finally) exit an intellectually and spiritually engaging career.  I hinted at this when I wrote about my friend Barb’s work on choosing joy as a key to successfully negotiating the last 1/3 of life.  In my mid-70s, I am aware that realizing longing—turning it into a goal and a plan–is constrained by the unknowability of what the future holds and how that might reshape what I long for.  But I can choose which emotions I want to experience regularly.  Joy may be a bit exaggerated for someone who is Swedish-American to the core, but I can consider the meanings that the word evokes in me:  Happiness.  Flourishing. Engaged. Useful and not used up.

The past two years made it apparent that the next step is often revealed by unanticipated (and even unwanted) “opportunities”.  Most of us existed with a simple hope that a year-and-a-half of chaos and inability to plan for anything, including dinner with friends, would end. But it is complicated. In the waning phases of my paid work, someone recommended that I become a life coach.  Intrigued, I did my homework and consulted with friends who combined coaching with their research and teaching.  Seemed like a no-brainer and clearly a plan:  I could develop a small life coaching “business” as part of my retirement.  But I have not, in part because of COVID, in part because we moved away from my networks, and in part because I found opportunities to use what I learned in ways that that I did not anticipate.  I am not interested in being an entrepreneur.  Do I feel that I have been unable to achieve something I wanted?  Absolutely not:  Instead, I see the many ways in which coaching has just become part of how I live in relationship with others.  It changed me without becoming a goal.

I am beginning to understand that my inchoate and often unarticulated curiosity, imbricated with  longing and constraints,  conspire to help me to define “opportunity” more nimbly and make choices guided by something that is more instinct than intellect.  I admit that my mostly goal-free and mostly “successful” life has been a gift – and  try to appreciate the last lines of Robert Frost’s poem, Acceptance (which I will never fully live into):  

Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.

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