Aging: a fearsome word in a youth-obsessed culture. The desired stage of life, youth, is depicted as threatened by the aging process. Granted; youthfulness, with its energy, its hope, its sense of the future, is a desirable quality of life, perhaps essential. But let’s not confine those qualities only to the young in years. Yes, the stages of youth and aging are irreconcilable; one precludes the other. However, the stage of aging and the qualities of youthfulness are quite a different matter. Not only can they co-exist, sometimes they actually do, each enhancing its counterpart. The proportion of past to future, of memory to anticipation does shift with the years. But the richness of experience, accumulated in memory, need not prevent an engagement with the future.
My wife and I defined retirement to mean redirecting energy, not dropping bovine-like onto green pastures, grazing as time scurried rapidly onward. Instead, retirement to us meant being open to unscheduled, unanticipated opportunities for further involvement in the great life experiment. While we looked forward to possible new adventures, we were also worried about losing the connections with the future that our occupations – psychologist, rabbi, teacher, chaplain — had provided. How quickly this concern was answered! By virtue of blessed guidance, or chance, if you insist – in less than half a year we found ourselves engaged with the Tibetan exile community in India. For these past 15 years, we’ve been travelling regularly to India to help the followers of the Dalai Lama develop a community-wide educational program on strategic nonviolent struggle for the Tibetan cause. This Western, pragmatic, how-to-apply-it complement to his idealistic, inspirational advocacy of nonviolence, has been welcomed and facilitated by His Holiness. Aging? Despite increasing intimations of mortality, don’t fear it. Join it. With youthfulness as a companion, it can still be quite a trip!
Rabbi Everett Gendler is a devoted Jewish civil rights activist. He’s been described as the “father of Jewish environmentalism.”
