Living in the COVID-19 World ... and Beyond #23: Some Thoughts on Growing Older (Part 2)

In my last blog (#22), I recognized the importance of not pretending to be younger than we actually are, that we need to face the reality of our current age and take appropriate steps to be thoughtful with ourselves given our age and health.

There is a second tendency that I see in myself and others relative to growing older.   This tendency is about our lives getting narrower and smaller.  

When I was in my 20’s, I was starting new jobs in different organizations, I was dating and trying to meet people, I was going to graduate school, and I was joining various activist groups based on my interests.   I was trying out lots of different activities to see what I really liked to do.  I was making a lot of new friends in all of these different places.   The number of new friends that I was making was growing exponentially.    New friends introduced me to their friends at parties or other get-togethers.   I remember I had a rolodex (remember those?) that was bursting with cards that I kept adding with new people’s contact information.

Once I got into my 30’s, I was married, bought a home, and settled into a profession and stayed in one organization for 20 years.   The rate of meeting new people was definitely not as great as it had been in my 20’s.

It appears that there is something that happens as we get older, and I’ll call it an oppression associated with growing older.   We tend to become more settled into our lives.  We tend to have established a primary relationship, we tend to have established a job and career, we tend to have established a set of hobbies and activities.  Hopefully, these are all things that we like and enjoy and that are meaningful.      However, we can become a bit stagnant or overcome by inertia and the comfort of familiar things.   

There is a pressure to conform as we grow older that tends to make us less spontaneous, less tolerant of differences, less experimental, and to feel less permission for individuality or creativity.  This was illustrated in the movie “Hook” where a man in his late 30’s forgets that he had once been Peter Pan, and the young people in Never Never Land have to re-teach him to be Peter pan again.  

I want to challenge this stagnancy and conformity in my life and encourage you to do also.

I don’t see any reason why it does not make sense for me to learn new things, experience some different activities, and continue to make new friends as I grow older.  It actually seems like doing these new things is what helps one stay younger in their minds (although not in their actual age).  

But it is hard to branch out in my 60’s, and I suspect that it might be for you too as you grow older.   It requires me to really push myself out into the world.   The pandemic has made this both more challenging and easier.   More challenging as we have been constrained relative to face-to-face meetings, and easier because technology has opened up possibilities that I never knew existed.

I think I need to be deliberate – what do I want to learn, what people do I want to get to know, what experiences do I want to have?   And then break out of comfortable patterns that have me busy doing what I have been doing and make the time for something new.  It is a conscious choice and decision.  

It seems possible that my life can get wider and bigger rather than narrower and smaller as I grow older.   And that is a possibility that I intend to pursue.