Month: August 2019

President Reagan observed that if you find a room filled with horse manure, there must be a pony in there somewhere.  He was an optimist.

A pessimist would be sure that the pony had trotted off already.  A scientist would have tried to figure out how the manure got there in the first place, or perhaps if the pony had a good diet.

Who has not heard about the glass and its contents?  It is half-full for some, half empty for others. A physicist points out that the glass is always full. The question is, with what besides air?

I was raised on Winnie-the-Pooh stories.  I have written before that, early in our marriage, I read the Pooh stories to Judy, who had not been introduced to them as a child. Since then, we have visited the Hundred Acre Wood and even thrown Pooh sticks off the bridge. I am sure these have contributed to our years of marital bliss.  We even have characters we have agreed capture at least some of our agreed-upon characteristics. Eeyore is not one of them.

It would be hard to call Winne anything other than an optimist. In his mind, what he wanted was always possible.  Likewise, Eeyore epitomizes pessimism. Significantly, Eeyore is seldom, if ever, right. Winnie’s naïve optimism creates the situations that make up the stories.

A good friend prompted my thinking about optimism in an email exchange.  She is confronting a severe health issue and has been keeping those of us who care for her up to date with her progress.  The title she gave this particular report was “Cautious Optimism.”

I wrote back that I thought the prudent approach to optimism would always be cautious.  While agreeing to a point, she wrote back that she is “wildly optimistic about life.”  I could not agree more.

It is worth thinking about, when to be cautious and when to be wild.  In believing that there MUST BE a pony in here somewhere, President Reagan seems wildly optimistic when something more cautious—there might be a pony—would be prudent.  But then, the story loses its zing, something that the larger-than-life actor-turned-Governor then President would have resisted.

Given the arc of his life, it is hard not to think of our 40^th President as an optimist, wildly so. It was in his character to expect the pony to be there.

(An irony about presidential politics: candidates from the party not in power work like Eeyore to persuade voters that the only way to change the downward spiral of the nation is to elect them to be the next Presidential Pooh. For them, the pony has left the room.)

Is optimism a matter of nature or nurture or both?  People of a Certain Age, we all have known people whose nature seems like Eeyore. How did they get that way? Will they be like that forever? For their sake, I hope not.

I suggested caution because life is uncertain. We can’t know what might occur to thwart our optimism. Yet, to dwell on what negative things might happen would be immobilizing.

Columbus was optimistic that the world was round even while others were sure his ships would sail off the edge of the world. European immigrants to the Western Hemisphere were optimistic that they would not succumb to disease, starvation or attacks by hostile indigenous people. The Americans signing the Declaration of Independence were optimistic that their side would win, and that they would not be hanged for treason.

Isn’t deciding to bring a child into the world a resounding expression of optimism? Are the parents not wildly optimistic about life?

There is merit in the scientist’s desire to figure out from whence comes the manure and in the physicist’s reframing the question. These, too, might reflect the caution I mentioned.

Judy and I have spent many hours reading together Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. Pinker uses myriad graphs, charts, data sets, and historical trend lines to make his case that today is the best time in all of history to be alive, and he provides a persuasive argument that tomorrow is likely to be even better.

An optimist would be cheered reading Pinker because her outlook on life is reinforced. A pessimist might question the accuracy of the data.  Or he might say, sure, things are good now, but you just wait.

Pinker plainly trusts the data. Yet he allows that human beings are capable of doing stupid things that could change the course of progress, like starting a nuclear war.

(Imagine a conversation between an optimist—we did not start a nuclear war today; a pessimist—the day is not over yet; and a scientist—I need more data to reach a conclusion)

I cannot identify with the Eeyores.  I don’t know if Eeyores can ever change. I can identify with Pooh but hope that my optimism takes into account facts like how hard it is to control a balloon you are hanging onto in an effort to fly by and collect some honey. I am okay with wondering where the manure came from, allowing for the possibility of the pony still being there.

I don’t know if that can ever change in me. For now, I am content to be cautiously optimistic that things in my life will unfold well enough and still be, like my friend, wildly optimistic about life.

Daniel E. White

August 19, 2019

A recent issue of The Atlantic featured an article by Arthur C. Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute.  His title warned “Your Professional Decline is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.” When I finished reading, I lamented that there is no “required” reading list for people 50 years of age and older for the course in which we are all enrolled, called “life.” Brooks’ article could be on the list.

50 as an age has meaning for me. At age 50, I gave up a perfectly good job at a fine school in Sacramento to move to Maui, to a school recently rescued from mediocrity by a head who had departed to the East Coast.  A few years later, I realized that I had been an example of an observation made by a professional colleague to his audience some years before: if you have a department (or school or company) in which a large number of the workers are men in their fifties, you have a department (etc.) in flux.

The observation might well apply to women but I am gender-unqualified to speak to the phases of life for women.

My colleague’s reasoning:  By age 50, one has usually A) established oneself in a career field, building contacts and networks, reputation, achievements, etc.; B) participated at some level in the raising of offspring who are fast approaching, chronologically, appropriate self-sufficiency; and C) taken note of the fact that the usual age for retirement (at least when he spoke) is little more than 15 years hence.

These facts create questions. Should one continue with what one is doing up to age 50? Or should one strike out on a new adventure, one great last hurrah before settling into a well-earned retirement doing something. That “something” in retirement might not be clear then, but Wilkins Micawber assured us in David Copperfield, “something will turn up,” and usually something does.

So, when the illustration for Brooks’ article depicted a man standing atop a triangular staircase on a step labeled “50,” looking down at steps numbered “60” and “70,” I took notice.  I am further down the staircase.

Brooks asserted that “the data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, professional decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.” Then he offers more data to prove his point, examples from academia (research output), athletics (name your sport), policing, nursing, even (oh, the scandal of it all!) umpiring professional baseball.

People of a Certain Age, my friends and readers, we are all on that triangular staircase. We are all in professions or have been.  We can all grok (wonderful word borrowed from science fiction as you probably know) what Brooks is saying.

Happily, Brooks does not leave readers in despair. So-called Western philosophy and his own Roman Catholic faith did not provide Brooks with the insights he sought.  And the culture we share in the U.S. is not widely regarded for its creative ways of thinking about aging.  So, he looked to the East and found a Hindu teacher to explain the ways that faith tradition thinks about the stages of life.

There are four stages, explained the teacher. The first is the early years, dedicated to learning, lasting until early adulthood.  The second stage focuses on building a career, accumulating wealth, and raising a family.  Brooks’ teacher noted that these are the trap years when some, perhaps many, people become attached to “earthly rewards—money, power, sex, prestige—and thus try to make this stage last a lifetime.”

Happy are those who escape the trap, moving on to the third stage, “usually starting around age 50,” when focus shifts to spirituality and wisdom.

I wonder. If one surveyed churches, service clubs, and similar organizations, would one find the age range of the most actively involved to be those between 50 and 60 years old? Maybe.

Such activities do not end when one reaches stage four, though, the teacher observed. The third stage is meant to be a time of “studying and training” for the fourth. In this stage, we are intended, so the teaching goes, to be “totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment.”

Brooks wrote: “As we age, we should resist the conventional lures of success to focus on more transcendentally important things.”

This insight into life that Brooks and his Hindu teacher share is not about something accomplished in a vacuum.  Modern life is filled with sparkly distractions and enticing exhilarations. At times, transcendence can become lost behind the cloud of doing things; other forms of the “conventional lures.”

There are different ways of “doing” that match well with different stages of life. Brooks’ “professional decline” has an upside: growing understanding of the transcendental, if we are prepared to pay attention.

To share that understanding is the privilege accorded to people of a certain age. Brooks is a model: he left the AEI job to become a professor. There is a reason why so many cultures outside the U.S. venerate their elders—in Hawaii, we are called kupuna.  We People of a Certain Older Age know things we have learned through living.

Folks just need to ask.  

Daniel E. White

August 5, 2019