AHSS The Gift of Years: Future (Lesson 28)

“Old age,” in Louis Kronenberger’s view, “is an excellent time for outrage. My goal,” he went on, “is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” The future is a very sweet part of getting older. It is something to be grasped with fervor. It gets more intense, more alive, more essential every day. It is snapping at the heels, becoming more and more demanding as we go. Most people live as if everything they are not doing now, they could simply do later. For them there is no urgency to life, just a long, quiet movement toward the acme of it. But not everyone. Those who have come roaring into their sixties, full of life, relatively secure, brimming with ideas and finally full of self-confidence, come face-to-face with the meaning of mortality as they never have before. There is, they discover with a jolt, an end to time. Their time.

The very thought of there being no work to get done, no deadlines to meet, no public demands to satisfy, no mountains left to climb, offends everything these people felt was necessary to be alive. Being edged off the upper shelf of life into a kind of shapeless, formless, substanceless nowhereland freezes their very souls. These are the ones who now keep reminding themselves and the rest of their world that “we’re all getting older.”

Another state of mind struggles to come alive now. The sense of urgency that comes with the awareness of time, the thought that there is so much else to life than what we have known till now. There is so much air out there that I have simply not allowed myself to breathe. There is the rest of life to be lived that I have been unaware of until now. Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. It may be here, in fact, that we learn best what life is actually all about.

Old age is the time for letting out the spirit of outrage, the outrageous spirit that comes with having walked through the marketplace of life choosing between its fruits, tasting and discarding as we go. Finally, we know what is missing, know what is good, know what is needed. Now we can let our spirits fly. We can do what our souls demand that fully human beings do. This is the moment for which we were born.

There is nothing that can stop us now. Wherever we are needed, we can go. Whatever we would like to do, we can. Whatever needs must be said, we can say. Old age is the time to be dangerous. Dangerously fun loving, dangerously honest. Dangerously involved. Dangerously alive. This is the time to go, to parties and to political rallies, to music lessons, to the family that waits for us and to strangers who need us. This is not the time to remember that “we are all getting older” – as if getting older were the curse of the damned.

Tomorrow is sacred. It is the great reminder of the gift of life. It is our whole resource. It is everything we have left to give, and it is not without purpose. Most of all, tomorrow is for living, not for simply ambling around through life waiting to die. We will not be given tomorrow simply to allow ourselves to become one day older, one ounce less alive. It is the elderly who are the real signs of what life has been about and is yet meant to be. To abandon such a responsibility smacks of the immoral. “To save one life” as the rabbis say, “is to save the whole world.” To save one life, as we get older, is to live our own life well.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is to assume that the future is already over. A blessing of these years is to give another whole meaning to what it is to be alive, to be ourselves, to be full of life. Our own life.

1. Sister Joan quotes Louis Kroneberger on old age. He said, “Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.” What do you think of this idea? Have you done anything outrageous recently? If not, why not? What is at least one outrageous thing you would like to do at this time in your life?
2. “Old age, like every other stage of life, is a learning time. it may be here in fact that we learn best what life is actually all about.” What are three of the most significant things you have learned as you have aged?

Journal or share your thoughts on these questions.