Wisdom and Your Unfortunate Mortality

I have some good news and some bad news.

 First the bad news: You are getting older. As you celebrate one more birthday, you are bound to notice that time marches on, and ,inflexibly, you continue to march toward old age. I hate to be the bearer of such reality, but it must be pointed out.

But now the good news: You are getting wiser with each passing year. I think it is fortunate and no accident that wisdom seems to accumulate with your lifetime of experience. Wisdom is actually a form of intelligence that you cannot acquire any other way than by living. It enhances your judgment and common sense; just what you need for going down the road on the journey we all are assigned. The longer you live, the wiser you get.

When I reached my seventieth birthday, I made an announcement at my Rotary Club. I said, “ Now that I have reached 70, it is reassuring to know that I am not going to die young.” In other words, I had some consolation, that in achieving my senior years, I would have time to figure out what it means to be old. I reasoned that people who die young might have got caught without a chance to come to terms with mortality.

This is an expanding market, where more and more elderly citizens will have to deal with aging, one way or another. By the year 2020, there will be more people 60 and older than there has ever been on the planet. The population is already top heavy with senior citizens looking for answers about how to live later life to the fullest.

The problem is that there is a psychological resistance by some to the reality of being mortal. It is found in the cultural resistance to aging. Think: Wrinkle creams and plastic surgery, meant to delay the reminders of the plain old reality we have to look at in the mirror.

Others philosophically think pushing back against the tide of aging is simply a matter of handling the mounting years with dignity: “Stay young and beautiful as long as you can.” “ You’re only as old as you feel.” This, I think, represents a philosophy provisionally embraced by those who have yet to face illness and loss that often comes with aging. More unbending reality.

The healthcare industry misleads us by supporting a fantasy that maybe we can soon replace every ailing part of the body, as if our body were a car kept running forever with continual replacement parts. It is not unnatural to imagine that, unless we are hit by a train, we can live forever, and conquer every disease.

Yet if some people lived forever, they would still not figure out what QUALITY of life really means. With no hint of mortality, there would be little motivation to find meaning in the latter half of life. I am lobbying for a deepened sense of life in contrast to the superficial unexamined life. I seek quality not quantity, where single moments of meaningful experiences are prized. 

"Life eternal", as a Christian concept, is not, I think, an experience in chronological time. The Greeks have a word" kairos" which means meaningful time, the right moment. It begins in the NOW when there are opportune moments of engagement or beauty with family and friends that transcend chronological time. Who knows where it ends?

These are not easy ideas to cope with, requiring all the wisdom we can muster.