AHSS Gift of Years: Learning (Lesson 16)

Agatha Christie, still writing bestsellers in her eighties, shattered the very idea of a sclerotic old age. If anything, she is an icon of the link between education and experience, of the notion that learning is not only a lifelong task but also a lifelong summons to renewal of the soul. She is quoted, “I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations and suddenly find that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study or read about. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thought was rising in you.”

There is danger in thinking that we have completed our preparations for life with the completion of high school or a college degree. Degrees wear out quickly or prepare us for only one small area of life, at best. We are still young when the certificates turn yellow on the wall and the knowledge that they proclaim is obsolete.

The danger in later years is the myth that older people cannot learn as they have in younger years. Fear of mental collapse becomes the anxiety of the age. “I think I must be losing it…” is said with a laugh at first and then becomes a mantra, if not a silent gnawing fear. The effects are somewhere between panic and despair. Has it finally happened? Is this what the mean by dementia? The bad news is, maybe. The good news is, probably not. Very unlikely. Not normally.

One of the most positive results of the rising incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in a large and aging population is the amount of research now being done on the human brain. The assumption was simply that the brain ages as the body does and as the body declines, so does the brain. The image of the shrinking, atrophic brain loomed large in our minds. Age meant mental deterioration, as surely as the night follows the day. But is that assumption true? No.

Old brains are indeed physically smaller, but no less intellectually competent than young ones. And, in some ways, in terms of reflection and creativity, they are even better, if for no other reason than that they have a lot of experience to add to intellectual acuity.

As Agatha Christie put it, we “bloom” as we grow. New abilities emerge. New insights arise. New vision is possible. The danger lies in not feeding this growth. With nothing to think about, with no challenges to engage us, with no problems to solve, the question looming is: What is left of me? Why bother? Why not quit?

There are two approaches to aging: passive aging and active aging. Lifelong learning, a Harvard study notes, makes the difference between healthy and unhealthy aging. It determines the degree to which life will be satisfying to us, as well as the degree to which we will be interesting, valuable, and life-giving to others. Surely the capacity for ongoing learning and the sense of new meaning it brings to life is not an idle gift. The very fact that it develops as we grow means that it is meant for something important. When life, in all its physical dimensions, becomes less accessible, less doable, less desirous why wouldn’t this capacity for learning be exactly what is needed in a generation whose responsibility is to bring the wisdom of the years to the questions of time? What shall we learn now?

Sister Joan says: “A burden of these years is the fear that they bring nothing but incompetence to our once-competent selves. A blessing of these years is that we find ourselves at a time of life when we can finally concentrate on all the things we have ever wanted to learn and know and, as a result, become and even more important, more focused, more spiritual person than we have ever really been before.”

• Are you engaged in passive aging or active aging? Or perhaps you have moved from one to the other. Discuss or journal your journey.
• Sister Joan writes, “The questions then is not, is the older generation capable of learning anymore? Instead, the obvious question is only, what shall we learn now?” List in your journal or discuss with a friend three to five things you would like to learn at this point in you life and explain why.