People have some funny ideas about aging.
When my grandchildren were young—since I was both six feet, seven inches and the oldest person they knew—some of them were under the impression that the older a person gets the taller he or she becomes.
They were afraid my days of fitting in the house were numbered.
Looking back, I'm not sure their idea was so strange. On a good day, I could easily forget how old I am.
What often brings me back to reality is the name that the people at our Foundation have given me to distinguish me from my son. When I walk down the halls I overhear them saying, “Have you seen Senior?” or “Was Senior in that meeting?”
I was retired once with no thought whatsoever of a second career. Then one night I volunteered to help Bill and Melinda respond to the requests they had been receiving for charitable donations. And now here I am.
One good thing about growing older is that it gives life the time it needs to present you with unexpected opportunities.
Living longer is an unexpected opportunity many Americans have today that people in plenty of other places don't.
I think the average life expectancy of a typical citizen of Mozambique is in the neighborhood of only forty-seven years. Living into your seventies and eighties is mostly for the well-off and healthy.
So having seniors to worry about is a high-class problem for a society to have.
Seniors actually represent an enormous resource. Nearly half a million Americans over the age of fifty-five are volunteers for the National Senior Service Corps, serving as foster grandparents and in other roles. Hundreds more are in the Peace Corps.
We all know seniors who are the most dependable members of their churches and service groups.
Others have kept working or started second careers.
One friend of mine is a retired nurse. She recruits surgeons to travel with her to the Himalayan country of Bhutan twice every year to perform surgeries on children there.
In my opinion, what often holds seniors back from doing more is not biology, but what we think of them.
Sometimes we're quick to spot the limitations aging imposes and miss its compensations.
In studying the relationship between age and greatness, author Melanie Brown noted that the history books are full of people whose greatest work was done in their later years—among them Justice William O. Douglas, the sculptor Louise Nevelson, Marian Anderson, George Balanchine, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Hitchcock, Rembrandt, Bach, Jacques Cousteau, and others.
Dr. Brown noted that the painter Claude Monet had cataracts that distorted his perception, but suggested that he used that distortion to paint his glorious water lilies. She said that the delicacy, lightness, beauty, and softness of his paintings came not from perfect eyesight, but from perfect insight. Insight into the more subtle characteristics of nature.
My intention here is not to dismiss the challenges associated with growing older, for they are formidable.
I know well the frustration of being approached at an event by someone I know and having his or her name escape me.
At such times I can relate to the answer the late Bruce Bliven, a former editor of the New Republic, was reported to have given when someone asked him what it felt like to be an old man.
He said, “I don't feel like an old man. I feel like a young man with something the matter with him.”
All the same, I keep doing my memory exercises (which I hope are helping) and I am committed to an idea that bears a striking resemblance to my grandkids' notion of people getting taller as they get older.
It is that we never have to stop growing.