If you are the same kind of age as I am, or older, have you brooded sometimes, like me, over missed opportunities? Like how you didn’t become a professor / change the world / become rich / create that sought-after startup / have your ideas internationally recognised / become a speaker on the speaker circuit having people hanging on your every word? Join the club.
And now let’s leave it, together! Many people who have been successful have burned out, or accepted the assumptions of the system as part of their core set of beliefs. Now, around the time when traditionally successful people are retiring, now is the time to rise and shine. Why? Because they are tired, they want or need a break, they are (with some truly wonderful exceptions) a spent force. Not only do you have the energy, because you haven’t wasted it on “the rat race”, but you are open minded as well, because you haven’t “sold your soul” to the dominant ideology. Age, at our age, has the great advantage of experience, provided that we don’t let ourselves get stuck in stale assumptions or fixed positions. We are free, just because we have so little invested in the status quo.
You may have twenty years of active life in front of you, because you are still in good health, again partly because you have suffered less stress than many, because you have lived your life nearer, or at least not so far away from, your genuine deeply held beliefs. Many at our age have lost their beliefs, out of cynicism or complacency — or maybe just from too much comfort. We still have deeply held beliefs, and they are developing in richness, because our minds are still well and truly open, growing, ever fresh.
We are hungry for conversation, because it keeps becoming clearer that no one is to be despised, that all have their own stories, their own value, and that we can sometimes learn the most from people who are the least like ourselves. As we make more sense of the world, have more experience, we are able to relate to, and empathise with, more and more kinds of people. In conversation, we long to share our knowledge and experience, not imposing it, but offering it as another angle, another contribution, just as we value the contributions and angles of others.
We are hungry also for collaboration, because our experience has proved beyond doubt that we cannot do a great deal by ourselves alone, separately. We have had the time and opportunity to pit ourselves against the challenges of life, and to have experienced resounding failures. Many successful people have done that as well; but failing in the public eye runs huge risks to mental health and stability. Not many have that resilience. We have had more time to build up our resilience, out of the limelight. And it is the stronger for that.
We accept, naturally, that we will never be Olympic athletes. That is for youth of body. We will never be grandmasters at chess. That is mostly for youth of mind. But emotional, psychological and spiritual resilience and wisdom can grow throughout life.
Perhaps I am just revisiting T. S. Eliot:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Carpe diem — the unexpected day, not the expected one.
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