Random reflections and observations

Politics. We're heading into a new presidential race that unsurprisingly enough feels like a repeat of four years ago. Biden versus Trump, unless each party comes up with a better candidate to represent them. I wish both men would retire quietly, without a lot of fanfare and chest beating, and leave the arena to new and younger blood. Although promising at one time, De Santis just doesn't make the grade; he seems like a mini-Trump sans the bravado and in-your-face aggressiveness. But he pales in Trump's shadow. If Trump wasn't in the picture, maybe he'd have half a chance. But I don't think he has what it takes to be president. Neither does Trump, for that matter. I cannot understand why anyone still supports Trump, but I've given up trying to figure people out. He's a national embarrassment and I can say that; I live abroad and I see the reactions of the European media to him. No one can figure out the Trump supporters. Many theories have been advanced as to why they support him, but there doesn't seem to be one defining thing that makes them like him. It's actually a bit scary. 

Society. I saw a meme on Facebook today "Forget world peace, just try visualizing using your turn signal when driving". That's about where it is for me. I suppose we need to aim high--world peace--but at this point, I'd settle for a return to common courtesy and common sense in society. It seems that the world is mired in greed, lack of ethics, lack of empathy, lack of respect, and lack of common sense. I see it every day here in Oslo. The rudeness in society is appalling; bicyclists who don't stop for pedestrians in the crosswalks, but who suddenly stop for no good reason in the bike lanes, causing those behind them to brake suddenly. One day there is going to be a major accident involving many cyclists. Bicyclists here are as thoughtless as many car drivers, but we're always hearing about how rude car drivers are, never how rude bicyclists are. That's because the Green Party here has to push its message, which is to bike in any and all circumstances. "Neither rain, nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail" should prevent the good Oslo citizen from biking. It borders on ridiculous. It's like the Green Party has forgotten that winter in this country is a good five to six months long. I don't understand their point of view and I never will. Some construction projects take years to plan, finalize and complete. Not so with bike paths; they are constructed and finished before you have the chance to take a breath. When they want something, nothing stands in their way--that's the motto of the Green Party. I have no problems with biking; I've been biking my entire life, since I was a child. But I won't bike in the wintertime, and I don't need fascist propaganda telling me to do just that. And as an 83-year old friend of mine recently commented--not everyone can or is able to bike, regardless of age. She's right. 

Religion. I attend mass on Saturday evenings/Sunday mornings hoping to find some peace and quiet that are conducive to contemplation and prayer. Not to be had. No matter what (purportedly sans music) mass I attend, the priest insists on singing some part of the mass. Unfortunately, about half of the priests who say mass cannot sing to save their lives, so it's both painful and irritating to listen to them. I stand in the pew and pray that my irritation dissipates, but it's a bit sad to find myself in that position at mass. I don't want to be thinking about my irritation at something that could be solved easily--just have one mass for those people who don't want priests and/or the congregation singing at them, who don't want to sing the entire mass or even parts of it. Just have a quiet mass, for heaven's sake. Is that too much to ask?

Friendship. In the final analysis, friendship is defined for me by who is there for you in good times and in bad. I have a small circle of lifelong friends without whom I couldn't imagine my life. They are in my heart forever. The rest are just acquaintances or work friends, and with a few exceptions, I cannot rely on them to be there for me. It's always been that way, but now that I'm retired, I see it more clearly. They do not prioritize getting together; they prioritize work and more work, anything that furthers the work cause. Now that I no longer work, we have less in common. If one relies on these types of people for friendship, one will be quite lonely. I don't, but I acknowledge the strangeness and clarity of it all. But suddenly, when they want to get together, they expect you to dance to their tune; they decide the time and place, you show up. Not all of them behave that way, of course. But accommodating their schedules doesn't work for me anymore. I used to do that, but no longer. My schedule is just as important as theirs, perhaps more so, because I have plenty to do now that I'm retired. They don't think so, however. So these types of relationships will eventually fade away. As will many other things, since life is about letting go.

Getting older. That leads me to the final observation--getting older means getting tougher in all ways. I'm simply not interested in wasting my time on people, situations, books, films, series etc. that give me nothing, that don't inspire me, that don't make my life better. I don't want to waste time doing things that I don't want to do, and that includes spending time with people who are sometimes nice and sometimes not. I want to spend time with people whose moods are for the most part stable, who are kind at heart, who have Christian values, and who are not rude or aggressive or passive-aggressive, or who try to gaslight you (as in, they never said or meant this or that, but they did say it and they did mean it). I want to spend time with people who are as interested in my life and what I'm doing as I am in theirs. I want to spend time with people with whom I can have a real and meaningful conversation. There is so little of the latter; it truly surprises me that more people don't miss having good conversations. I miss my parents and my brother, who were people I loved and with whom I could converse. Our times together were real, likewise our conversations. 

Feeling invisible

I've been reflecting on the dynamics that occur in conversations between men and women, either personal conversations between two people of the opposite sex or in mixed-gender social settings. The personal conversations that I can comment on are those I've had, or those that women friends of mine have had that they have commented on to me. In social settings, I am an active participant in the general conversations about society, politics, and work, but at one recent gathering, I stopped talking toward the end of the evening and just observed the people in the room. It was interesting to intuit the dynamics present in the room. During the early part of the evening, I observed an egalitarian interflow of ideas and comments between men and women, but toward the end of the evening it changed, and I'm not sure why, perhaps because the men let down their guard more? Perhaps because the topics of conversation became more serious? It is this change in dynamics that interested me as an observer and as a woman. The thing that struck me was that the men did not follow up on the women's opinions and thoughts, not in the same way as they did with the men present. Their comments and in-depth talk were mostly aimed at the other men. Perhaps this was the case simply because they felt more comfortable discussing with men because it is a generational thing--most of the men are in their early sixties or older. It can be a generational thing--that men are more preoccupied with impressing (and possibly competing with) the other men in the room as has so often been the case through the centuries, so that listening to women is an afterthought and not a priority. I liked all of the men in the room, so my observations have nothing to do with not liking them. It's just that it felt as though they were accommodating women's opinions without agreeing with or sanctioning them, and they did not follow up on women's comments, or if they did, they did so in a dominating way which is a sure way to end a conversation. In other words, they did not engage further, and it felt as though that was a deliberate choice. It made me wonder if this was because they do not consider women to be as important as they are (generational?). I have never felt that way in conversation with men who are thirty or forty years younger than the men at this gathering. It is a strange way to feel, and the reason I felt that way is because I did not feel comfortable after a while expressing my opinions, and I noticed one other woman give up the fight to be heard as well. What happens is that you open your mouth to comment on a particular topic of interest, and you are suddenly overridden by a man who does not listen to your comments or wait until you finish speaking before he jumps in with his opinion or thought in a dominating overriding fashion. Or you open your mouth and your comment is ignored--essentially, not followed up. The fight to be heard is a question of how to deal with this type of behaviour from some of the men in the room. I noticed that the women were much more likely to listen to the men's comments and to let them finish talking before they commented. It felt strange to me, and at some point, it felt as though women were unwanted, even invisible. I may be overreacting, but the feeling was strong. Some male work colleagues over a certain age also behave in this way, whereas I rarely have that feeling with the women I converse with, which tells me that I have been lucky with my choice of female friends and female work colleagues with whom I converse. It makes me sad that men can dismiss women in this way, even though I know that it has gone on for centuries. It also makes me sad to think that perhaps this is another price that women have to pay for growing older in our society, that they are expected to know their place, take it, and be happy with it (sit down and be quiet). My mother used to say that getting older made her feel invisible. I share her view. But then ask me what she didn't do. The answer is--write in order to become visible.

Reflections on getting older in our society

I was listening to one of Oslo’s more well-known psychotherapists the other night on the nightly news; she was talking about the problem of aging in our society and how older people become ‘invisible’ as they age. She meant that both women and men felt this way, and she should know since she deals with both. I have written about this before; my mother used to say that she felt invisible as she got older—to the society around her, in the doctor’s office, and in her dealings with the bureaucracy that is supposed to help older people. My mother was not an aggressive soul, and often not even an assertive one. She accepted this type of behavior without reacting or fighting back. I doubt that I would be the same, but you never know what you will face as an older person. I have friends my age who are chronically ill, not old, and they complain about the same thing—they feel invisible, ignored, and that they should basically just stop bothering others and fade away. If I sort through their comments, I realize that much of what they comment on has to do with the loneliness associated with their illnesses. They feel abandoned, mostly by friends, sometimes by family. They have become immobile, they can no longer work or contribute to society in the ways to which they were accustomed. And today’s society will leave you in the dust as it pushes onward in its continual quest for more wealth, more material goods, and more consumerism. If you cannot produce for that society, or consume the products of that society, you have no role, really. Older people were once revered for their wisdom and experience; that is no longer the case, at least in Western society. They are more likely to be pushed out of their jobs once they turn sixty; they are considered burdensome to deal with in many cases. It occurred to me recently that old age is treated like a chronic illness in our society; older people are often shoved to the side, ignored, and abandoned to ‘their fate’, especially if they are alone. My mother did something about that; she volunteered at her local library (having been a librarian earlier in her life), and enjoyed that for most of her seventies. She worked there up until a few months before she died. But still, she often complained of loneliness and of 'not being seen'.

Many people fear getting older. I can understand why, because the society we live in worships youth and youthful attractiveness. You are considered attractive if you remain 'youthful-looking'. If you are attractive, you get 'noticed', you get 'seen'. You need only look at Facebook and the comments made about cover photos of women in their sixties whom others say still look like they did in high school. I hardly think that is the reality, but it doesn't matter. People still make these comments and I have to wonder why--why is it so important that older women look like they did in high school, and why are women flattered by these comments? These comments are not made so much about older men, but that is perhaps because men generally don't comment on such things. Women are told by society to be interested in how they look almost from the time they are pre-teenagers.

Society does not revere older people as once it did. It focuses solely on younger people and their contributions to society, workplaces, and culture. The media are to blame for much of this; articles about older artists, actors, actresses, workers, etc. are often few and far between. We have become an age-fixated society; you cannot read an article without being told how old someone is, and more often than not, if the article is about a woman, her age is usually mentioned as early as in the second sentence of the article. A man’s age is often not mentioned, or mentioned further down in the article. There is a certain amount of ‘surprise’ in some of these articles; surprise that this or that older person is still working, producing, contributing. It is strange sometimes to read these articles. They reinforce the fixation on age and the idea that the norm is that older people have stopped doing these things. Sometimes I wonder what has happened to this or that person since they are no longer written about, and then I remember, oh yes, that person is now ‘old’ by society’s definition. In other words, no longer media-worthy.

I used to think that old age meant age 70 or older. Old age includes anyone over 55 at present, at least in Scandinavia. There are many articles that talk about how employees who are 55 or older are offered ‘sluttpakker’ (severance packages) so that companies can hire younger people in their place. They don’t say that outright of course, but the intent is clear. And it is a way of getting rid of employees they feel cost the workplace too much. There is truth in that older people often have higher salaries than the younger people, but that is natural after a long work life. It is strange to think that we are living longer, but that the age for being considered old in a workplace has gotten lower. I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that if society considers you to be old at 55, society is going to have a real problem with this portion of the population that can in theory live until they are well into their 80s.

The psychotherapist’s advice was that older people should ‘tar plass’ (literally take up space) in society. What she means is that older people should make themselves noticed, that they should announce their presence; that they should do everything within their power to not be ignored. This means that older people need to be more proactive about how they approach retirement and old age. They should not passively let society and the media define their roles in society. They should not let younger people dictate to them how they will function in society. They should not let themselves be treated as though getting older is an illness. Because it is not.

We need to be more accepting of life’s phases and to not be so afraid of aging. One thing is certain—everyone will get old at some point, and everyone will die at some point. The focus on ‘forever young’ may be in vogue, but if you take a look at some of the men and women who try desperately to remain youthful-looking via plastic surgery, you will learn quite quickly that it is better to age gracefully. With some few exceptions, most of those who have opted for extensive plastic surgery do not look younger, they look different; they do not look like themselves. I would not want to go into old age no longer looking like myself, but that is my choice. The psychotherapist said the same thing; she was not planning on using plastic surgery to remain young-looking. I applaud her. She will lead the way to something better, something healthier, than what we have in society now. When I remember the older people in my life who have passed away, I think of people whom I respect. I miss them, their wisdom, their patience, their kindness, and their civilized way of living. I miss their generation—the post WWII generation, the generation that sacrificed for a larger cause. They grew older with grace and with patience. They may not always have liked what was happening to them, but they accepted it and lived their lives as best they could. I want more respect for that approach in society. I want more kindness and more acceptance, on both sides. Everyone loses if the polarization of young versus old continues.

  

Remembering and becoming

When I started out in the work world over thirty-five years ago, I was fortunate enough to meet some very special people who became life-long friends. One of them was Edith, who was already in her mid-50s when I met her. She was the head secretary for the department I worked in at the Public Health Research Institute of the City of New York, and we became friends immediately. She was a friendly and outgoing woman who made everyone she met feel welcome and at home. I would say she was one of the most hospitable people I have ever known. She was a born and bred New Yorker who lived in Manhattan most of her life. She married and raised two children in a spacious apartment in the Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, a large, post-World War II development of residential apartments on the east side of Manhattan. That apartment is where I visited her many times on my annual trips to New York, and it is where she suffered the stroke that eventually took her life at the age of 91. She had many opportunities to leave Manhattan, to move to the suburbs to be with her daughter and her daughter’s husband, but she chose not to. She remained independent until the day she died. I remember my last visit with her a few months before she passed away; she was waiting for me at the door of her apartment as I got off the elevator, and although she was very unsteady on her feet, she insisted on serving coffee and some pastries. And when I left her apartment a few hours later, she held onto my arm as we walked toward the door. Sometimes, before it got too difficult for her to walk, we would leave her apartment and walk to the nearby diner to have lunch--one of her favorite places because it made veggie burgers that were out of this world. And then we would walk slowly home again. It was always a bittersweet moment to say goodbye, much like when I said goodbye to my mother after one of my annual visits, not knowing if I would see them again, but hoping against hope that I would. Edith was a truly generous soul, who helped a lot of newcomers at work, who helped her children and grandchildren, and who took care of her husband who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s until she could no longer manage his care by herself. My memories of her are very pleasant; she and Virginia, another secretary at the institute and one of Edith’s close friends, both taught me how to make an apple-cranberry pie for the first Thanksgiving I ever prepared food for. It was the first such pie I had ever made; we made it at work during our lunch hour one dreary day in November, and I carried it home with me on the subway that evening. Unfortunately, I dropped the pie onto the subway platform and the glass pie plate shattered, and I ended up having to make the pie again when I got home. But at least I had learned how to do it. In return, I taught her how to use the newest word-processing program on her work computer. She was open to most new developments, was interested in the world around her, and very well-read. She loved to go to Shakespeare in the Park and to the opera and ballet. She and Virginia came to the church when I married for the first time (very young); when I later got divorced, she told me that it was no surprise to her, as she had not had a good feeling about my marriage from day one. She was honest that way, and it was good to hear it. If you asked for advice, you got it. I asked for advice when I needed it, because I knew it would be reasonable and smart.

I thought about Edith recently because I realized in one of those moments when certain insights make themselves known, that I have overtaken her role for some of the younger people I know, some of whom are at least twenty-five years younger than I am. The age difference between me and Edith was much larger, over thirty-five years, but it never bothered me. I hardly thought about it. That was the way I was raised. I had older parents and my relationship with the both of them was very good. They were my parents first, and then my friends. I assume that the younger people I know feel the same about me as I did about Edith; the age difference does not matter. Why should it? We are able to discuss books, music, movies and so many other things that interest us. I like a lot of the current music and literature; they like a lot of the music I grew up with, as well they should since it is really amazing music and an amazing era in which to grow up. We need role models to show us how to grow older. I had them, and I hope that I can be one for the younger people with whom I have become friends.

Getting older

When you’re young, you never really consider what it will be like to get old. What I mean by that is that the idea of getting older is a purely theoretical one when you are twenty or thirty years old. You know that one day you will be old, but it seems far off and not much to get bothered about. And then one day, you are older, or at least at the age at which point you’ve lived more than half your life. You are no longer a middle-aged person. People start to view you differently, and you view yourself differently. You become more serious about the things that matter; after all, there is no time to waste on foolish things. At the same time, you learn to laugh at yourself more; after all, you’ve earned that right. You know who you are and you like yourself. You may not be as pretty, or thin, or fashionable as you once were when you were young, but you no longer care. Or you do care, but not in the same way. A good day is one when you’ve had a good night’s sleep, wake up without a lot of small aches and pains, look reasonably presentable for work purposes, and get yourself through the day without being unnecessarily bitchy or frustrated. But society won’t let you grow old gracefully. It insists on putting in its two cents on how you should look and behave. And believe me, it’s not easy facing certain people in society and telling them to mind their own business; that you want to grow old gracefully without a lot of plastic surgery, Botox and fillers. Or that you are not interested in pumping yourself full of hormones to become youthful again. I spend a fair amount of my weekdays with younger people, and I can tell you that I do not envy them their youth. I would not want to return to my thirties and to the uncertainty of those years. You’re still finding your way, building a career, clearing the jungle and carving out your niche. It’s fun but at the same time, it’s deadly serious and a lot of hard work, overtime and weekend work. And if you’re looking for a partner to share life with, it is hard work to find the one that ‘fits’ you. And so it goes. Maybe you find the right person, and then you might want to start a family, with all the work that entails. No, I don’t want to go back or to be young again. I’ve earned my stripes and I want to be able to leave the work world and to leave my projects and tasks over to those who come after me—the younger workers. One day they will be old and will face the same thing. More power to them until that day comes.

So why do people make stupid comments—about your getting older, about the fact that you no longer look the same or act the same as you did when you were younger? That you look 'different' than you used to look (translated--older, more tired, etc.)? When those comments are made to me, my answer is--of course I do, I'm older. I'm no longer thirty years old. Getting older is not a choice. It is not something anyone can do anything about. Why should people feel guilty about getting older? Why do they need to be reminded about it constantly? It is no one’s ‘fault’ that people get old. It’s just life. But society won’t leave older people alone. And many older people feel as though they have to act ‘younger’. I am not one of them. I am honest about feeling tired, about not having the energy I once had, about wanting a more peaceful life, about wanting to retire, about not wanting to be ‘on’ all the time. I don’t want to work full-time until I die. That’s my choice and that’s my right. And if you don’t like me for it, that’s fine—leave me alone. Find someone else to reproach. And if you want to harass me for getting older, again, leave me alone. I don’t want you in my life. As far as work goes, I want the younger people to take over my job eventually. I have no reason to cling desperately to it; it does not define me—it is not my identity. I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do work-wise and I’ve done plenty. I’ve done enough to last two lifetimes. I want to use my time doing other things—volunteer work, library work, working at an animal shelter or working at a garden center—who knows what time will bring? Whatever it brings, I’ll tackle it. Just leave me alone and let me grow old gracefully. I have some good role models—older folks who have aged gracefully--and they do not (and did not) apologize for being old or for getting older. And I have never made them feel as though they had to, never. I’m proud of myself for that when I see the stupidity around me, and grateful for the wonderful relationships I’ve had with the older people in my life. They shared their wisdom and showed me the importance of empathy. It’s them I miss (those who have passed on), not youth, and not the stupidity of youth and of a society that worships youth. My mother used to say, once you got old, you became invisible. She was never invisible to me, and older people in general are not invisible to me. Again I say, if you have a problem with getting older and need to harass older people to deal with your own insecurity and fear of death, you can disappear from my life. I don't need you in it.