A story of age and age’s intellectual exertions.
by John Clinton
While working at a facility north of home, I travelled daily past an older looking farm house and often saw an elderly gentleman sitting on the house porch under a canopy in a sofa chair. The man was there many warm days and evenings and I, at that time in the middle years, was curious as to his inertia. But to admonish him his inaction, I soon realised, was naive; this person was quite probably twice my age. My thoughts then turned to his. In the winter of his years was he reminiscing, yearning for a past gone, or perhaps anxious regarding more contemporary matters?
“I’ve got a bad prostate and a broken heart.”
Well, my splendid middle years have waned, as I enter the ninth decade of living with all the annoying displeasures that include the unruly leakiness of the body. The man on the porch, by now, has been trusted to the dustbin of history.
But this is the thing — figuratively speaking, I am the man on the porch now, and younger others may ponder my reflections. But these notions are the secrets of all ‘men on the porch,’ wot? Our paths have nowhere to go.
Looking at end-of-life in the face, it occurs to one that materialism has centered our world view on secular possessions and selfish attachments to money. And at this phase of living, seems non-philosophic, thoughtless and apathetic. How to escape the dominance of materialism — the assertion of spiritual values?
There are two concepts that shape a life and that we are likely to muse upon in the ebbing years of our meagre lives that are constitutional to humanness; purpose and meaning.
Purpose envisions objective work and outcomes. It provides a sense of function, duty, usefulness; an individual’s place and contribution to the larger good in the world. Purpose is the reason we do what we do, providing the power of unfinished work to keep us alive.
Meaning imagines subjective values significant in experiences, understanding and connection to others, to nature, to a higher power. It can afford us well-being, satisfaction.
Thinking about these attributes cultivates self-awareness, realising values and virtues, and how they are manifested in one’s emotions, by one’s behaviours.
Many young and middle-aged people are purpose-oriented; studying, training, working, partnering, parenting, supporting, partying, saving, consuming, planning, growing. Life is flush with beginnings and no ends. And purpose evolves as the future overtakes the past and present. But the future is not-yet and the past is no-longer. And when we enter the winter of our years we ponder deeper thoughts about the meaning of the present. When one has been purpose-oriented, and the resoluteness to finish our work is no more, we can fall back on notions of meaning.
On his retirement, an old school friend told me his associates offered congratulations. They should have offered condolences he said to me. We read how this time can be used to recreate oneself, do something we have always wished to do. But is this false expectation? I used a dentist in the 1970s, and I visited his home after he retired during this time. He had a large bookcase newly built in his lounge which then only held a dozen novels. I asked about the empty shelves and he told me acquiring and reading books was his retirement project. I spoke to his spouse later, after hearing of his death and, instead of following through with his plan, he had joined a pyramid scheme (Amway) selling soap and household cleaning products, attending rallies in the U.S. cheering for the tribe. This was completely out of character, but I presume, gave his later years purpose – but meaning?
When one has not been ardently devoted to reading for much of one’s life is it reasonable to expect to be fulfilled by such an undertaking in one’s late years? This could be said of many hobbies/pursuits; gardening is a rewarding pastime, but if a green thumb has not been fostered during early years, the experience may not be gratifying.
My past school-hood friend and I are facing the stubborn realities, the dreaded simplicity of living the last years less much of the purpose we had relished as younger men, not to mention boredom and loneliness; emptiness, one of the sadnesses of nature. And we search for meaning, now deprived of our routines, connections. Have our lives represented anything significant in the larger world? Will we be remembered by others? Or will the world we live in go on escaping us forever? How did I come to be in this world? I didn’t want my mother and father, they wanted me. The irony of the human condition, the anxiety of death, but it is life that awakens it.
Metaphysics, the philosophical study of the real nature of things; the determination of the meaning and principles of what Is (what comes after physics.)
Aristotle found reality took the form embodied in matter and thought; the senses, only. Plato saw everyday life as object of the senses but also as object of the intellect; the invisible world of realities; the finite pointing to the infinite.
Can we imagine a world without philosophy, absent the big questions of our human beingness, our uniqueness? Do the thoughts and potentials invoked offer meaning as we peer down the road to age and death?
But other disciplines enter the discussion; the fine arts which give us pleasure. (Artists give us something philosophers can’t — goose bumps.) Can we imagine a world without literature (the art of the story), without theatre, dance, drawing and painting, and of course the most indefinable: music. Successful music has its own language and has an effect on us that many have tried in vain to describe; it takes us outside of ourselves.
Do philosophy, the arts, help us realise significance in our lives? Is leading a more simple authentic life the goal, a more meaningful one rather than feeling we are left standing in quicksand?
Some of us might say, what probably is meaningless is the question as to whether life has meaning. Life, it has been said, has significance, effects, authority, mystery — magic, if you like — but no meaning. The meaning is that it is. But, if no one has found a greater meaning for life, neither has anyone demonstrated that life has no meaning.
A meaningful life is worth living in order to understand a little more of it.
For those of us who wish to live consciously, to know the worst and praise the best, must meet all doubts if we are to maintain our pretense to a life of reason.
Whether or not the philosophers care to admit that we have a soul, it seems obvious that we are equipped with something or other which generates dreams and ideals and which sets up values.
Conceiving a child is purposeful. Loving that child is meaningful. Perhaps this is the idea that affords us meaning: Love.
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto the nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
(Emily Dickinson)
