AHSS The Gift of Years: Limitations (Lesson 24)

Maggie Kuhn said, “Old age is not a disease. It is strength and survivorship.” When we ignore the fact that all of us are on an inexorable journey to our own old age, we miss the gift of years. We miss the profound insight that we are never too young to begin to see ourselves as old, to imagine ourselves as now, at this moment, shaping what we will be in years to come – as well as the way we will become it.

Maggie Kuhn left seminary work at the age of sixty-five and founded what became one of the most influential groups of retired people the world had ever known, the Gray Panthers. The group was dedicated to nursing-home reform, to the elimination of agism, and to the eradication of the social concept of “disengagement,” the notion that older people should be beyond, outside, disengaged from the public arena. A whole new population was speaking out against ageism. Legislation, economic support, and public awareness emerged. The elderly were alive and well and on the move. We are their inheritors.

Is it realistic to think that the elderly elderly – eighty-year-olds- can possibly have any real effect on public issues? Whatever the limitations of each of them might be separately, according to Maggie Kuhn, “Old people constitute America’s biggest untapped and undervalued human energy source.” More than that, they teach the rest of the population, all of its various age groups, something about the power of limitations. They make us rethink the entire function and meaning of ‘limitation.”

Limitations – those physical boundaries that the old reach before the rest of the world – are only that, elders show us. They are boundaries not barriers. They limit us, they take time and energy, but they do not stop us unless we decide to be stopped. In fact, limitations in one area simply make us develop in another. Imitations, at any age and every age, call out something in us that we never considered before.

They also alert us to the needs of others. Once our own eyes are not as good as they once were, we want visual aids for everyone. Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience. We aren’t as arrogant anymore as we used to be. Just as we learn to do routine physical things differently, we can keep attempting to find another way to get a Congressperson on the phone, to launch a petition to get a letter to the editor published in the paper.

Finally, limitations invite others to get involved as well. We create a community out of the needs of others and the gifts we can bring to them while they, in turn, enrich us. We become connected to the rest of the human race, all of whom are just as limited as we are, whether they know it yet or not. Limitations are the mutual stock of the human race. By helping ourselves we also help others. By helping others, we extend our own reach.

We are only as limited as we want to be. When we define ourselves only by our limitations, we fail to see to what greater things those limitations are calling us for. Age and limitations are no excuse for being a nonperson in a world that needs icons of truth and courage, vision, and possibility as never before. What the world wants in the elderly is: wisdom, truth, and the sign of a better future for us all.

Sister Joan says: A burden of these years is the possibility that we might succumb to our limitations as if they were the real definition of age, rather than an aspect of everyone’s life. A blessing of these years is that we know at last what really matters, and the world is waiting to hear it, if only we will make the effort and don’t give in to our limitations.

1. According to Sister Joan, “Limitations… are boundaries not barriers.” Is this true for someone older you know? Explain through journaling or discussion.
2. “Being limited gives us an opportunity to learn both humility and patience,” states Sister Joan. Recall a limitation you have experienced or are now dealing with. Discuss or write about how it taught both humility and patience.