Holding Back the Tide

Author's Note: I always protect the privacy of the people I write about in this blog. The details about my friend, below, have been altered to a place where that individual's anonymity is preserved.

“That George Floyd ruined everything!”

The statement is sudden, vociferous, and completely apropos of nothing. I thought we had been  discussing how to talk your way out of a speeding ticket. 

The appalling non sequitur startles me so much that I do what I have vowed never to do.  I engage.

“How can you say that?  George Floyd was murdered!”  I know, as soon as the words are out of my mouth, what a mistake they are.  They unleash a screed—part conspiracy theory, part victim blaming, part right-wing diatribe about how hard it is to be an affluent white man in this country today. 

“He was drunk!” says my companion.  “They say he was not a nice guy.  And besides, we don’t really know what happened.”

“Oh, but we do,” I respond. “We have a nine-minute video shot by a brave 17-year-old that shows a human being pleading for his life while a cop presses his boot on the man’s neck.”

“Those videos are faked,” he dismisses the evidence airily.  “It’s easy to do, you know.  And you have no idea how hard it is to be a police officer in this day and age. Thanks to George Floyd.”

This interchange, though extreme, is not uncommon in my dealings with my—what do I call him now? Friend?  He used to be that.  We were young together, taking our first uncertain steps into careers and life. I have called him friend for decades.  But something happened.  Where he lived and who he hung out with changed. Slowly, our roads diverged. For a while, we kept talking, intrigued by our differences; wanting to find the common ground.  Believing, out of history and respect, that it was possible. 

Now?  Holy, moly, this is hard. I want to retain this relationship.  I believe that there is an objective good in continuing to talk, even as we disagree.  Echo chambers are no good for anybody, and sometimes I fear that I live in one, here in my progressive bubble.  For society’s sake, we need not to retreat into our own comfort zones.  We need to keep talking to the other side. It appears that rigidity, and division, do not get better with age. My friend is approaching 80 now.  

Mostly, I avoid subjects likely to tumble us down a rabbit hole.  This puts a lot of things off limits: politics, religion (he has become both evangelical and fundamentalist, and fears for my soul), and much of modern society and culture.  In the case of the George Floyd comment, I lamely revert to “We are not going to agree about this.  We better leave it.” Which, of course, makes me unreasonable.

In my quest for compassion, whenever somebody triggers me, I try to make two stops before I respond: one with Carl Jung, and one with Buddha.

Jung’s guidance in this matter is the “shadow self”-- the idea that when we have a strong negative reaction to something that somebody does, it’s because there is something inside ourselves that we don’t like. Some slimy little snake of shame or self-disgust that we are trying to hide. So we project the opposite.

Is there some trace of bigotry in me that has me going off on the George Floyd comment? Possible, of course. But I think Buddha will help me more in this case --- the Buddhist idea that underneath all negativity lies suffering.  This makes more sense where my friend is concerned. Raised by cold, critical parents, he spent a childhood on the sharp thorns of disapproval; feeling like he never measured up. And he’s lost a lot

lately--a longtime marriage; a child to a fentanyl overdose. When the latter happens, there is almost always a boatload of anger and blame and self-recrimination, corrosive and malignant, directed both inward and outward.

Heartbreak.  It might explain --- if not excuse --- a lot.

A recent story in the Washington Post has me thinking about how we age. It was mostly a re-hash of stuff we already know: get hearing aids as soon as you need them.  Stay off ladders.  Exercise. Give up your driver’s license when it’s time, but get good at ride shares or other alternatives to keep you engaged. 

What struck me most about the article was a new tranche of evidence about how much longer people live when they focus on the bright side of aging.  Yes. The bright side of aging. On average, people live about eight years longer, controlling for all other variables, when they refuse to see themselves as old or falling apart. Once people attribute every setback to their age, they fall into a trap of negative self-expectations. So, stop kvetching and keep moving, and avoid the negative self-talk. Instead of: "My back is killing me!" try "Look how much of my body still works!" Instead of "Oh man, hearing aids? Only old people have hearing aids!" try "How cool is it that I lived long enough for technology to give me back what I lost?"

Yale professor Becca Levy wrote a book about this called Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live.  “In study after study,” she writes, “I found that older people with more-positive perceptions of aging performed better physically and cognitively than those with more negative self- perceptions; they were more likely to recover from severe disability, they remembered better, they walked faster and they even lived longer.”

So quick, just for fun, let’s list three things that rock about aging. 

1.     Senior discounts! Last night I saved $3 at a comedy club! 

2.     Retirement; AKA—this is so not my problem anymore.

3.     Naps.  Never used to take ‘em. Now: love ‘em. 

There’s also the existential stuff.  I feel wiser.  I feel more comfortable in my own skin.  I care a whole lot less about what people think of me.  I have largely given up striving and focus more on just being.  I have a rich memory bank of people and experiences and emotions that I can call up—fun in the good times and essential in the bad.  I have experienced that surprising phenomenon, over and over again, of thinking I cannot get through this and then finding that, actually, I can.  I have done it before. I can probably do it again.

At 25 or 30, I didn’t know any of this.  At 25 or 30, no way was I asking Jung and Buddha to help me deal with people like my friend.  That came with age, experience, and scar tissue.

Aging is hard.  It’s going to get harder.  We lose our abilities, our roles, our influence, our people.  But if doing it well is at all a matter of where to put our focus, I know where I will try to put mine.  And if I slip into inflexibility, close-mindedness, or bigotry, I am counting on the friends who love me to call me out.

Epilogue

Last weekend, I went to visit my friend.  This was more an obligation than anything else.  I know he is failing physically, and I felt I needed to check in.  I was steeled for unpleasantness. But he was great. He seemed well, physically and mentally.  He was upbeat, poking fun at himself. There were no diatribes, and minimal complaints. We sat in his living room, watching the rain of an early spring storm soak the vineyards around his house, and the emerald green hills beyond.   It was a lovely afternoon.

So I guess I need to add a third thing to my compassion roadmap. After stops with Jung and Buddha, let’s make one more: stay open and try not to make up our minds too completely—too irrevocably --- about anything.

Given a chance, people just might surprise you.