Always we want to learn from outside,
from absorbing other people’s knowledge...
The trouble is that it’s always other people’s knowledge.
– Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom
The aging columns I’m writing seem to be filled with questions. I’ve noticed this recently and wonder why the switch from all the more confident writing of facts, theories and experiences I’ve put out there about early childhood.
Perhaps the wise elder, in the play “Snake Talk: Urgent Messages from the God the Mother,” said it best: Don’t pretend to know where you’re going, because if you know where you’re going, that means you’ve been there and you’re going to end up in exactly the same place.
These questions we are all asking as we age are not analytic, where we think our way through them logically to a conclusion or get answers on Google. They are deeper questions we are asking that lead us to our own truth. They are soul-level questions. They “find us,” and we must trust the beauty of them unfolding in us.
They are coming from dreams, a line of a song or poem, something we overhear, a feeling that won’t go away. They may be musings, wonderings, fears or sorrows or joys that arrive for no reason we can name. They may be repeated likes or dislikes toward something we can’t define.
How do we find the courage to face the decline in our abilities to function? How can we be honest with ourselves about memory failures, trouble hearing, the fact that we can’t earn what we once could? How do we open up to the wisdom and compassion or anything else that may be developing in us now? What will death be like? How do we want it to be?
These are the kinds of questions we’re asking now. Ram Dass, in his book, Still Here, says: By beginning to ask the important questions, we instigate a process of opening and deepening that can alter our lives in miraculous ways by bringing the awareness of impermanence and death into the present moment ... Do not seek for answers that cannot be given ... for the point is to love everything. Live the questions now and perhaps, without knowing it, you will live along someday into the answers.
This feels right to me. Searching outside of ourselves, looking for someone, some teacher or book to answer these questions seems to be trading the precious questions for someone else’s answers. We need patience to be with the questions, to live them, as Dass says. Perhaps they are navigational tools to guide us through this unmapped stage called aging.
Many of these questions come from a place of worry or fear about aging and death. By being more present and letting them breathe a bit, we can get more comfortable with these feelings, get more clarity and become receptive to whatever comes. Maybe this is where the wisdom comes in.
Meeting together with others helps this process. Being mirrors for each other assists us in the difficulty of trusting what is developing in us when it is so different from what our mainstream culture values. We’re birthing something new as we age, and we can’t do it without support. Listening carefully to each other, not only with kindness, but with genuine interest, helps us unfold what is ripening within us.
The important thing with these questions is to ask them, love them, let them work in us for a time and be interested in the truth of what is evolving in us.
Martha McClellan has been a developmental educator in early childhood for 38 years. She has moved her focus now to the other end of life, and has written the book, The Aging Athlete: What We Do to Stay in the Game. Reach her at mmm@bresnan.net.
