TRANSCRIPT
I have a friend who is older than me who made a comment that I found very insightful. He said our choices in life add up, and as we get older, we’re heading in one of two different directions: toward wisdom or toward decrepitude. It’s our choices, added up over time, that are going to take us in one of these two directions. The more choices we make in this direction, the further and further we get on this path toward wisdom or toward decrepitude.
Well, now I’m not as old as he is, but I am getting older, and I do see this in life. The people that I’ve known for a long, long time, especially the people who are my age that I’ve known since they were children, I’ve seen the choices they make, and they are heading in one of two different directions. It’s interesting. What I’ve also seen is it seems that most people are heading toward decrepitude.
When I look around in the world and I look at most older people, especially people that are quite a bit older—70s, 80s, 90s—most of them are in decrepitude. They’re breaking down. Their bodies are breaking down. They’ve made bad decisions with their bodies, but it’s mostly in their mind, in their thought processes, in their attitudes, in their relationships. There’s something about them that isn’t wise, it isn’t giving, and it isn’t loving.
A lot of times, the things that they had in their lives that disguised who they really were underneath the surface—their grandiosity, their work, their career, their fanciness—the things that made them look fancy, well, a lot of that just wears away. What really was going on under the surface, the real character that they had, it shows up in their life. Usually, it just requires looking at them to be able to see this, but sometimes maybe you just need to talk to them a little bit.
I can’t think, just even in the last week, of some of the old people that I’ve had more close interactions with: broken-down, miserable, feeling suicidal, looking like hell, alcoholic, really, really unkempt, not smelling so good, very, very, very lonely, depressed, unhappy, angry. They never ever ask me anything about myself, just very much self-centered. And yet, on the other hand, I have very few examples of older people who are really giving, really caring, really insightful. Very, very few people are making that path, making the choices that add up toward real, sincere wisdom.
Now, what is it? What is it that allows people, in my opinion, to make choices that go toward more wisdom and away from decrepitude, from breakdown and misery? To me, I think the really deciding factor is if we have processed or are processing what happened to us in our early childhood. The traumas that we went through, maybe even our longer childhood when we’re a little older than early childhood, processing our basic relational dynamics, especially with our parents, learning about the abandonments that we suffered, the traumas that we suffered, the flaws in the relationships that we had, and learning how to grieve our losses.
Learning how to love ourselves in spite of the ways in which we were not loved, learning how to grieve the violations and those traumas. And why does that allow people to make better decisions? Well, what I’ve seen is when people don’t process the bad things that happen to them, they end up repeating those dynamics over and over and over again.
When people end up, when they’re old, living in decrepitude, often they’re just playing out the dynamics, the unconscious dynamics that were set in place decades and decades before when they were very little children. They’re playing out the horrible relational dynamics of their families, and they’re still trying unconsciously to get their parents, who are long since dead, to love them, often by proxy. What they’re ending up doing is becoming old people who were still hurt little children who didn’t get their needs met, and they’re trying to get the world to do it.
They’re looking for rescue. They’re looking for doctors to rescue them. They’re looking for their children to rescue them. They’re looking outside, people in the world to rescue them. But they’re just the people who just take, take, take. They didn’t become altruistic. They didn’t become people who were giving. They didn’t learn how to become generative, how to give more, because they didn’t learn how to give to themselves first. They did not resolve their traumas. They did not make sense of their history of violation.
And that’s why I think so many people hate getting older, because life really doesn’t get better. Nature doesn’t honor people who make these bad decisions toward dishonesty and toward being shut down. What I see is nature and life honor truth. Nature and life honor decisions that are courageous and go toward wisdom, breaking the lives of our family systems from when we were children and headed more toward grieving.
Grieving, it’s such an interesting subject, especially when I think about people getting old and becoming ugly, having ugly characters. When I was a therapist, I saw it so many times. I worked with many clients who were quite a bit older than me. Some of the people who actually, their lives had kind of made them decrepit. They were old, they didn’t look so healthy anymore. And yet, what I saw again and again and again, such that I take it as a rule of life, a part of the wisdom, the life experience that I’ve gained, is when people really began to grieve.
When they let out the ancient emotions of their childhood that they’d held in for so long, when they were able to look at what happened to them and feel what had happened to them, to feel that loss and to make sense of it, their energy came back. The blood came back into their faces. They looked young. I saw people who I did not think were beautiful become beautiful, and it happened fast. It happened as the consequence of being honest, of going toward that grieving process and entering it. People really becoming lovely and looking young, and in those people, I could see people steering away from decrepitude and going more toward wisdom.
The more and more people stayed in that path, what I saw, I couldn’t believe it. And I’ve seen it in myself too, becoming younger. Some part of our soul infiltrating our whole system and making us, at some emotional, maybe even you could call it a spiritual level, making us more youthful. Now, I’m not gonna deny that my body is getting older. I see it. I see wrinkles on my face, and my eyes are getting older. I’m not as strong as I used to be, not as fast as I used to be. But some part of my soul, the more that I’ve grieved, grieved the historical things in my past that were so painful, the more my soul is younger. The more I have incredible amounts of energy inside of myself because my emotions are free, my true self is free.
And I have seen other people do that—the rare few who I really see in this crazy modern world who are heading toward more and more and more wisdom. It’s amazing. I’ve seen people become incredibly more creative as the result of the process of growing older and growing more wise on the inside. So that, for me, is my goal: to keep making these decisions, these little tiny decisions that add up and add up and add up over time toward having a more meaningful life, a more productive life, a life that allows my soul, my truth on the inside, to be more free, more honest, more out there, more strong, more confident, more flexible, more real.
And for that reason, I find that getting older is an exciting process, and it’s also a curious process. I don’t hear too many people that are getting older or are really old saying they’re really curious about what’s coming. Instead, more, they’re scared, or they’re just not thinking about it, or they just simply don’t like it. It’s boring, it’s more lonely, it’s more isolated, it’s more frustrating. For me, I find it, in a strange way, exciting. What’s going to happen next? Who am I going to meet? But more importantly, who am I going to become, and what more will I have to offer this world?
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