As I said in the previous post, 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.  And so, here in a fourth post, are some reflections on “Boredom” and “The Comradery of Aging.”

Boredom

I guess I’ve never understood it. While I’m reflecting on it, of course, in the context of the aging process, the truth is that I literally can’t recall a time in my life—from my earliest childhood memories to the present—when I was bored.  There has always seemed to be something that engaged my time, my attention, my mind. Oh, I may have had momentary flashes of something like being bored while occasionally suffering through some particularly poor play or piece of music or (egad) sermon, but boredom as some sort of malady, a state of being, something to be dreaded?  I just don’t get it.

Since Frederick Buechner seems to understand it better than I do, here is a quote from his book, Whistling in the Dark, A Doubter’s Dictionary:

“You can be bored by virtually anything if you put your mind to it, or choose not to. You can yawn your way through Don Giovanni or a trip to the Grand Canyon or an afternoon with your dearest friend or a sunset. . . . The odds are that the Sermon on the Mount had more than a few of the congregation twitchy and glassy-eyed. To be bored is to turn down cold whatever life happens to be offering you at the moment. It is to cast a jaundiced eye at life in general including most of all your own life. You feel nothing worth getting excited about because you are yourself not worth getting excited about. To be bored is a way of making the least of things you often have a sneaking suspicion you need the most” (p. 23).

Although I have seemed to avoid this, there’s no sense of accomplishment involved here—my engagement in things that have occupied my time and my mind, and continue to do so, have not come as a result of effort on my part to avoid or resolve boredom but, rather, more as gifts—“things” that always just seemed to be there at the edge of my consciousness, at the periphery of opportunity.  Can I explain it? No, not at all. Am I grateful? Oh, yes, profoundly and forever so.  May it never change!

The Comradery of Aging

 After I finally retired, for the fifth time, and began to settle into actual permanent retirement—my wife had assured me that if I went back to work, she’d kill me, so it was an easy decision—I began to reconnect with friends, former colleagues, and even some former classmates from college days. A few were local, which provided opportunity for lunches or seeing each other at events or classes at a lifelong learning institute. Facebook provided occasions for interactions long since lost and my decision to set up a blog site attracted comments and conversation with others with whom I had lost touch.  In other cases, I simply began interactions on a different level with friends with whom I had been and remained in close contact over the years.

While simply reconnecting with these people after, in some instances, so many years has been pleasurable in itself, it has been a shift in the nature, the quality, the substance of our conversations that has been, for me, a fascinating discovery. Part of it is simply the recognition that however different our lives have been, however divergent the geographic, cultural, or career paths we have taken, there are histories we all share. Frederick Buechner, again, captures a sense of it:

(When you reach a certain age,) “you start having a new feeling about your own generation. Like you they can remember . . . Lum and Abner, . . . the Lindbergh kidnapping,. . .  cigarettes in flat fifties which nobody believed  then could do any more to you than cut your wind.  .  .  .blackouts, . . . and where they were when the news came through that FDR was dead of a stroke . . .  and they could join you in singing “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” There aren’t as many of them around as there used to be. (Even if you don’t say anything and neither do they,) something seems to pass between you. They have come from the same beginning. They have seen the same sights along the way. They are bound for the same end and will get there about the same time you do” (Whistling in the Dark, a Doubter’s Dictionary, pp. 3-4).

But beyond that, I have been struck by how many of these friends share the same “wonderings”—whether we agree or not—about what I would call Ultimate Questions about life, about death and what does or does not lie “beyond,” about the existence and/or nature of a Supreme Being—that “Mysterium Tremendum.”  I’ve also found that most of us tend to share a renewed interest in family, both immediate and past, about our own personal life history and what it has meant to us and, hopefully, to others. And I’ve been struck by how many of us, at this stage of life, continue to be interested in opportunities to learn more and to explore things that lie beyond the boundaries of those areas of knowledge that fed and supported us in whatever career(s) we pursued.  

It’s as though the aging process has had a “leveling” effect that calms the ripples and even the waves that may have characterized the differences in our life journeys and brought us to the “waters of a similar mindfulness.”

No doubt I could go on, but perhaps the point is made. I have been pleasantly surprised and gratefully blessed to have discovered what I will call this “comradery” with so many of my contemporaries who, along with the rough patches, are experiencing the good part of this process of aging.  Thanks, mates, and may more of the same be waiting around the corner.