AHSS Gift of Years: Freedom (Lesson 18)

In some ways, we are all just getting to be more of who and what we have always been. We can decide right now what we intend to be: approachable and lovable, or tyrannous and fractious. The Austrian novelist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach wrote, “Old age transfigures or fossilizes.” We don’t, by nature, sour as we get older. The fact is that we have always been sour, but now we take the liberty of doing it with impunity. We don’t get softer as we get older. We simply get to be more unabashedly loving every day of our lovable old lives. We only get to be more of what we have always wanted to be. We are free to choose the way we live and relate to the world. Our attitudes shared and the meanings we get out of it are choices. And all of them can change.

The tendency to talk down to older people comes from stereotypes of incompetence that have been so much the caricatures we’ve drawn of older people once they have left the work force. Instead of honoring the wisdom and experience of the generations before us – as did the Greeks and the Romans and the American Indians, for instance – industrial/technological society infantilizes anyone whose life is no longer caught up in the skills and languages of that world. Once people can no longer talk about advertising plans or departmental goals or the job, the experience they garnered over the years is no longer a premium in the very society that produced it all. All ties are cut. All connections have expired. All experience has gone to dust.

Instead, Joan writes that we, “are ‘free’ to be useless, the window-dressing on the society, the people left behind after the system doesn’t need them anymore. Freedom can be redefined for those aging out of the workforce or their productive middle years… Freedom in later years is the exemption from having to live a standard-brand life. I no longer need to ‘fit in’ to all the conventional wisdom, to the company policies and politics and political positions. I can take any position I want. I can be a socialist in a republican club. I can be a feminist at a meeting of the pastoral planning commission. I can be an environmentalist at the oil company’s stockholders meeting. I can take all the pieces of my life, weigh them carefully, and then speak the words my world needs to hear- before it’s too late.”

When we realize that freedom really is the right to be ourselves rather than someone else – perhaps for the first time in life – the liberation of the soul begins. We can become something new, as well as simply more of the old. Whatever path we have followed to this point is not the only path we have ever considered, been fascinated by, wanted to explore. We have the right to explore new ideas, to think new thoughts. The ones we did not learn at home, the ones we have never dared to admit to in public. We can begin to think about God for ourselves, for instance. Our answers will surely be closer to our hearts.

Finally, we are now free to become involved in life in ways we never did before. Now is the time to think it all through again. Everything. God, life, work, relationships, behaviors, goals. We are free to measure all of them against our experience, to reshape them out of new knowledge, to try things wherever our new spiritual energy leads us, to add new ideas to the old ideas that have controlled our lives for so long.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is to allow all the stereotypes of old age to hold us back, hold us down, to stop the flow of life. A blessing of these years is that they give us the chance to break the bounds of a past life, and to create for ourselves a life more suited to what we now want to be.

1. “But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years,” says Sister Joan. Write a letter to yourself or discuss with a friend what celebrating the best of the self you have become would look like.