While this series of “mini”-reflections on aging are clearly personal and about my own aging process, they are also meant, hopefully, to resonate with the experiences of others at or near my age. That said, these ruminations will appear, usually a couple in each post, from time to time.  And here, along with a couple of “umbrella” statements, is the second set, “On the Known and the Unknown” and “Friendship.”

Two “Umbrella” statements

• The only thing worse than getting old is not getting old (a friend of mine has reminded me that this statement needs a caveat: for some, “getting old” can bring the kinds of severe limitations—cognitive or physical—that does make it worse than “not getting old.” Thanks, Joel).
• Younger certainties become older uncertainties.

On the Known and the Unknown

The longer I have lived and learned—and the learning never stops—the more conscious I have become

• that the larger the “circle of what I know or think I know” becomes, the more the circumference of that circle touches the vast expanses of “the unknown;”
• and the more I have become aware of and humbled by all that I don’t know;
• and how overshadowed my “certainties” have become by all that remains beyond my grasp in that great repository of the unknown and, perhaps, of the not-to-be-known. 

Which opens the door to what I mean by “knowing” in the first place.

• Without laboring the point too much or becoming too technical, I am convinced that I “learn,” I “know,” from experience, primarily sense experience, and by reflecting on those experiences.
• And those reflections assume the crucial role of reason in the ordering of experience, as well as the intuitive capacity of the human mind—the ability to grasp patterns, to “see” without additional data what one did not “see” before. It’s the experience that cartoonists symbolize by the light bulb over the head, the “aha” moment when “the penny drops,” or what my clinical psychology professor called “galloping insight.”
• Because I am a human “person,” whose experiences, concepts, and language are boundaried by space and time—everything is for me either here or there, then or now—I find myself, in making judgments about truth, about what I “know,” looking for “empiric fit,” what is compatible with or may be reproducible in my own experience.
• That is who I am and that is where I must start. I may not end there. I may choose to accept—to embrace, to act on, to believe in—something trans-human, something non-spatial and non-temporal, without claiming to “know” them beyond the shadow of a doubt.  
• This leaves a door open to further exploration and comment on the issues of “knowing” and “believing” and at some point down the road, I will walk through that door with you.

For now, suffice it to say that while I do not think I can live my life balanced on top of a question mark, neither do I think I have the truth neatly packaged. I am a person-in-relationship-and-in-process.  The fact that what I started as a child, and what I am momentarily “freezing” at this point in my life, is not finished and will not be finished until I die, argues for open-mindedness and intellectual humility.

Friendship

The older I have become, the older my true friendships have become and the less there are of them.  There are acquaintances and then there are friends—a distinction that is qualitatively different and that most anyone can recognize and intuit, but is much more difficult to define, to put into words.

• In high school, for example, I had “friends”—at least I would have called them that based on my age and my capacity for judging the difference, given that virtually all of them were part of my “church crowd,” beyond which I ventured little. But I remained “connected” to almost none of them after I left home for college.
• In college, away from the confining limits of family and the “one” church, I developed relationships that I can now comfortably identify as friendships in which trust, confidentiality, dependability, shared interests, and comfort were real and valued. That said, once college was over and we went our separate ways, most of those friendships softened, stretched, thinned, and found their way into the wind and no single one of them survived the grad school and career years.
• Grad school was different, since it was there in my second year that I formed what has become the oldest friendship of my life, now 60 years long and counting—perhaps saying something about my own maturing then as well as the extraordinary quality of the friendship. The lasting strength of that friendship, post-grad school, never did rely on how often we saw each other or communicated, sometimes many years between.  And yet, when we did meet, embrace, and talk, it was as though no time had passed at all.  And that is still true, a reality that continues to engender wonder every time we get together.
• It was the entrance into career—particularly since my career spanned 34 years in one institution and, in a completely unexpected post-retirement career, 10 years in another—that set the stage for the development of many lasting acquaintances, some of which bordered on friendships, and a precious few pure friendships which have lasted in some cases from 40 to 55 years, and a couple of others whose duration of a mere 10 to 15 years cannot gauge their depth and strength.
• And I must also note with sadness the deaths of several deep, longtime, and cherished friends and how blessed and impoverished I feel with each remembrance of them.

So what is it about these friendships—especially the ones that endure, that are life-changing, life-enriching, and life-supporting—that characterizes them and makes them distinctive, if not actually unique?  I don’t think I can express it any better than Frederich Buechner has in this quotation from his book, Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter’s Dictionary (p, 54): 

“Basically, your friends are not your friends for any particular reason. They are       your friends for no particular reason. The job you do, the family you have, the way you vote, the major achievements and blunders of your life, your religious convictions or lack of them, are all somehow set off to one side when the two of you get together. If you are old friends, you know all those things about each other and a lot more besides, but they are beside the point. . . . you are yourselves the point. . . You meet with a clean slate every time, and you meet on equal terms. Anything may come of it or nothing may. That doesn’t matter either. Only the meeting matters.“

So he says and, for me, so it is!