Tim Stafford's Blog, page 2

The Inside of Aging: Your Reaction?

Dear reader,

I posted these reflections on aging because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. My question for you is: would you like to see these collected in a short (100 pages or so) book? You can simply say yes or no, and feel free to add reactions and advice. I would appreciate your feedback.

Tim

The Inside of Aging: What It All Means

This is #23 in a series of essays on aging.

Aging involves inevitable disappointment and loss, and often includes suffering and grief. We naturally ask why. Has God deserted me? Why can’t I live in peace?

The increase in suicide may be a response to these questions. It is above all else an assertion of individual autonomy: “I will decide the timing of my death. This is my business, and nobody else’s.” Underneath that assertion is a question: Why am I still alive, when I have nothing important to do and nobody really depends on me? Why am I still alive, while I suffer? If I feel I have done everything on earth I care to do, and if life is filled with loss and disappointment, why not choose to end the game?

Those are hard questions to answer, and it is not my interest to disparage them. Indeed, I think they are unanswerable outside of a God-centered perspective. People who take the Bible seriously, however, have a framework for responding. There may be no precision to the answers, because we cannot see into the other side of death. God will meet us there, and we will see him “face to face.” Our lives in that other realm remain shadowy. What will we do? Will we see a connection between what we do here and now and what we do then?

It does seem clear that there is a connection. The promise of heaven is not like reincarnation. It is we who will rejoice there, not some other creatures. And what we will do and think will not be the actions of somebody alien to us. It will be us as we have become.

It stands to reason, then, that whatever we experience in the last days of our life is in some way a preparation. Given the amount of disappointment and loss involved, we can speculate that we are meant to experience purification—that our earthly hopes and our earthly ambitions are being squeezed out of us so that we can more easily absorb, without distraction, the most sustained and euphoric infilling of our lives.

We live today by faith, hope and love. Faith is famously “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” (Hebrews 11:1) Our faith is in God, whom we do not see, and the future he has for us, which is equally unseen. We are told that what God has planned will be good beyond our dreams. We believe we are being readied for it. That may not make loss and disappointment easier to take, but it ought to fortify us. We put our faith and trust in God; he knows why we are here.

The Inside of Aging: Finishing Well

This is #22 in a series of essays on aging.

One of my wife Popie’s mantras is: “finish well.” She applied it to our kids when they were young, whether in regard to a school year, a class, or a sports team. It’s easy to get tired, distracted or bored late in the season. Don’t do that. Keep your energy up. Renew your focus. You started strong; now finish strong. The prizes don’t go to those who run well on the back stretch, but to those who sprint to the finish line.

It applies to old age, too, but not in quite so straightforward a way. “Doing well” at 15 is not the same as “doing well” at 75.

Many of us become tired, sick, or discouraged as we age. I’s very easy to give up. When you can’t do the things you could as a younger person, it’s tempting to retire from doing anything. I have a friend in his nineties, in perfectly good health, with plenty of money, who appears to have surrendered. He’s isolated himself. He never takes initiative, and he’s resistant to invitations. He acts depressed but won’t admit it. For him, every opportunity is met by the same response: I’m tired. I’m ready to go; I can’t see why I’m still here.

I contracted pneumonia a few weeks ago, a disease I had never had before and hope I never get again. I was never exactly desperate.  I was always capable of shuffling to the bathroom or the kitchen or into the shower. However, I had no energy, no thought of energy, no will, no interest. I could barely make myself chew. And it went on for weeks.

When I came out of it, I thought: I bet other people feel that way. I bet sometimes they feel it for months, or years. I wonder if that’s how my friend feels. I’ve been impatient with his lethargy. Maybe I should rethink that.

None of us really knows what other people cope with. Given the variability of our existence, “finishing well” must become a flexible concept. It means one thing to somebody who is in good health. It means something different to the person recovering from pneumonia.

Nevertheless, certain aspects of life are integral, no matter what we face or how we feel.

Meaning. Finishing well means taking action that is meaningful to you and others. The travel and leisure that many people consider a good retirement rarely create meaning. Meaning involves giving, not taking. Some will find it in volunteering, some in grandparenting. Meaning means contributing, and it sometimes takes considerable ingenuity to find a way for it. I have friends in nursing homes who aren’t mobile and aren’t even mentally agile. Their contribution may be smiling instead of grumbling. That is meaningful, especially to those who care for them every day.

Focus. What are you going to do today? If you have no focus, life happens to you, and you go where the wind blows. That may be good if it’s deliberate. It’s not wrong to choose to spend the day wandering. The important word is “choose,” however. Most days, to finish well, you need to choose a productive way to spend your time. The psalmist prays, “teach us to number our days.” You number things because each one is distinctly important, and you don’t want to lose track of it. Days shouldn’t float by, one the same as any other. Each one deserves to count.

Doing the best you can. As we age, we discover that we can’t do what we once could. This is probably hardest for people who perform at a high level. Professional athletes find it true at the tender age of 35. At forty their careers are over.

I have a good friend who is a first-rate carpenter. He’s as good as he ever was at swinging a hammer or calculating a cut—maybe better. But when it comes to running up and down ladders, or hauling sheetrock, he can’t keep up with the young people, and it wounds him.

“Doing the best you can” means accepting your losses but not surrendering to them. It means focusing every day on making a contribution. You can’t do what you once could, but you can do something. You can give your best.

Love. For me, finishing well in old age means changing to a better value system. I can’t do what I once could, and my pride in my work (and my garden, and my backpacking skills, and my knowledge) begins to shrivel.

Actually, who cares? If anybody mentions that stuff at my memorial service, it will be only because I failed to grow in the most important department: love. I will have finished well if people remember me for my love.

If you maintain bitter quarrels to the end, if you’re not speaking to some people, you have not finished well. Finishing well requires reconciling, or at least trying.

Finishing well requires listening to others, paying attention to their needs rather than focusing on your own. That includes people you tend to dismiss—teenagers, perhaps, or blowhards.

Finishing well involves encouraging others even when you yourself feel discouraged. It means finding praiseworthy qualities and saying them out loud. It means comforting those who feel bruised and vulnerable.

If you show love in such ways, others will remember you with love. In fact, they will never forget you. You will have finished well.

The Inside of Aging: Time and Peace

This is #21 in a series of essays on aging.

The stereotype of the peaceful, patient grandparent is strong. Almost equally strong is older people’s determination not to submit to the part.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate peaceful, patient grandparents. To become one, however, feels like premature surrender. Our ambition is to be potent and lively and fun. We aim to keep skiing, keep dancing, keep laughing. Peace and patience seem far from that.

No question that we undergo a shift. We have more time, for one thing. Retired people complain that they are busier than ever, but the truth is that most have time to burn. True, stuff takes longer. We don’t have the energy we had; we take more breaks. Also true, lots of aging people take on big responsibilities for childcare or elder care. That is exhausting. But compared to the days of demanding fulltime jobs, of ferrying kids to games and practices, of cooking family meals and fixing the plumbing—not to mention remodeling the kitchen—we have time to read, to listen to music, to watch TV, to talk on the telephone. We make ourselves busy because we can.

The peace we gain is more uncertain. Anxiety often increases over time, and lots of older people fret and lose sleep over worries they can’t help. Sometimes the peaceful, patient grandparent is an act, disguising an anxious, critical inner voice or a sense of dread.

If, however, we take up our opportunities to gain wisdom, then peacefulness is a natural by-product. When you’ve seen a lot of life, and learned from it, you have a solid grasp of how to handle difficulties (quarrels, unexpected problems, disappointments). Worries take a lower profile. Panic doesn’t happen. The psalmist’s admonition to “number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” is a recipe for peace. Wise people are normally at peace.

If you think of it this way, it’s not so bad to become the peaceful, patient grandparent. And it’s not surrender.

The Inside of Aging: Bitterness

This is #20 in a series of essays on aging.

David should have died in peace. (I mean David of the Old Testament, who killed Goliath.) Despite a danger-filled warrior’s life, fighting to defend his throne from all rivals including his own son, he had retired from active service with his loyal son Solomon safely on the throne. His beloved nation of Israel was more secure than it had ever been, with no active schism and no enemy attacking its borders. Surely he should have died with one of his own psalms on his lips: “The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing.” (Psalm 23:1)

The reality was anything but that. David, too weak to get out of bed, called for his son Solomon and gave final instructions that might have come from a Mafia godfather. Joab, the fighting general who led my army? I want you to murder him. Shimei, the man I swore I would never hurt? That was my oath, not yours. “Bring his gray head down to the grave in blood.” (1 Kings 2:1-10)

Those are David’s last recorded words. Despite all God had given him, his soul was filled with bitterness and he had revenge on his heart.

It’s a terrible way to end your life, but I don’t think it’s terribly unusual. Bitterness can expand like a balloon until it fills all the space in your soul. Many people harbor bitterness until the end.

Frankly, I can’t imagine calling one of my children to my bedside with instructions for murder. My bitterness—most people’s bitterness—is tamer. Yet it remains toxic. If encouraged, it will poison my life.

Bitter about work. Those who invest deeply in their careers can become angry at how it ended. They got laid off. They got shunted aside from some big project. Somebody else got promoted. They never got admiration or appreciation for what they did. Nobody celebrated their retirement, or if they did, it wasn’t done with proper respect. Thirty years after their last day on the job, they can tell you how they were unappreciated. Bitterness lies just under the surface.

Bitter about what someone said. People say stupid things. Bitter people remember. They insist that they remember it accurately, and if someone tries to offer mitigating context, they have thought about it enough to argue forcefully that the offense was intentional. The words can be recited from memory years after the fact.

Bitter about lost opportunities. When you look back on a long life, it’s very easy to see the forks in the road where you perhaps took the wrong turn. At the least, you can imagine how life might have been different with another career, a lovelier partner, in a different location, with a different set of friends. Perhaps this is your fantasy world, but the root of bitterness can grow in such fertile soil.

Bitter about family ranking. Sibling rivalry is as old as Cain and Abel. Dig beneath the surface and those bitter memories float to the surface, unresolved, even without the perspective that time should give them. The longing to be the best, the most loved, the prettiest, the admired and respected, the one Mom cares for the most: this still drives people. To be the lesser brother is a bitter pill, and some people choke on it still when they are ninety and their rivals are in the grave. It makes no sense outside the family, but it can be a chorus in the head drowning out other sounds once it begins to sing.

The same rivalries can exist between cousins. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. Perhaps they love too much. As children they got in a tight clinch, and they have never been able to let it go.

Bitter about America. Those who fiercely love their country are often disappointed by it—and how could it be otherwise? A country is an amalgam of many people, with many traits good and bad. Idealism about the country you love can turn bitter, like any unrequited love. Listen to older people talk about America and you’re sure to hear at least a bit of this: disgust with the younger generation, with the government, with the regulatory environment, with traffic, with entertainment. (Terrible music, appalling shows.)

Bitter about God. At some point it comes down to this. The propensity for bitterness is really aimed at God. Some may shy away from saying it, but what other options are there? If bitterness fills your heart, then the Maker of All Things must be responsible. He has let us down.

Most people aren’t bitter. But maybe more are bitter than we commonly think. Some act like life is rosy but start complaining when you pierce the surface patter. Mostly they are older people. They have little future to look forward to, so they focus on the past. Very easily, memories curdle. Bitterness grows.

Maybe everybody has regrets, but why do regrets dominate certain lives? The answer is surely that a lifelong pattern leads to it: focusing on self, letting yourself wallow in self-pity without counterbalancing it with thankfulness. It may be generational. If you heard your parents complaining, you will likely do the same.

It’s possible to break this cycle, but it’s not easy. I doubt anyone can do it alone. Far better to catch the root of bitterness before it grows.

The Inside of Aging: Wisdom

This is #19 in a series of essays on aging.

Earlier I mentioned the psalmist’s prayer, “Teach us to number our days.” We are not to let days slip away but make the most of each one.

The prayer goes on: “that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The end result of carefully tending our days is a heart of wisdom. That is worthy of some thought.

“Heart” is best conveyed in the phrase, “the heart of the matter.” At the very foundation of life, the center-cut of meaning, the dense core of relationships, the bull’s eye of choice, stands wisdom. At our heart, we want and need wisdom. And wisdom is gained through carefully tending our days, “numbering” them.

Wisdom has little to do with intelligence. You can be very smart yet utterly foolish. Wisdom has more to do with managing things. The wise person knows how to get done what needs doing. She or he knows how to avoid quarrels and get along. You want wise people on a committee with you; you want them at a family reunion. (They are good with the drunken aunt or uncle. They know what to do with an oven fire.)

Wisdom is certainly not a guaranteed result of living. People can act like fools at 90 as well as at 30. Long life does, however, give you the chance at wisdom. Wisdom is the possible fruit of a long life.

When to keep your mouth shut.

Why it’s important to tell the truth and not cut corners.

The value of encouragement.

Choosing your companions carefully.

The dangers of debt.

Downfalls associated with sex.

Downfalls associated with drinking or drugs.

The gains of personal integrity.

The value of hard work

One could go on almost infinitely. Wisdom is not a list of virtues. It is far subtler than that. It is a skill, really—the knowledge of how to live. It comes as the fruit of experience, for those who pay attention. If you truly want to learn, you learn. Difficult dilemmas? You’ve seen those before and you know how to tackle them. You know what can work. You know what may lead to trouble.

Wisdom gets passed on, often from parent to child or from grandparent to grandchild. To “gain a heart of wisdom” usually takes a combination of mentors who exemplify it, plus the careful attention to life that wants to learn and pays attention to life lessons.

Most older people, I think, have a sense that they have acquired wisdom. That is to say, they think they know a thing or two. I certainly feel that about myself. It’s not a matter of thinking highly of myself. It’s simply an acknowledgement that I’ve been to enough rodeos to know when the bronco riding will begin. If you are frazzled by your son’s behavior, I might have some helpful ideas. Considering how to plan a big anniversary despite the fact that people have different agendas? I might be a useful counselor. When it comes to the practical stuff of life, I’ve learned something. Not everything. But something.

Those who have acquired wisdom don’t go around talking all the time. (That’s un-wisdom.) But they should look for opportunities to put their wisdom to work. Take their grandchildren for a hike and talk as they walk. Join a committee at church. Take somebody to breakfast who seems to be struggling.

Wisdom is not a program or a set of ideas you articulate. It’s situational. You respond to situations.

Older people do sometimes withdraw from an active life, and understandably so, considering their loss of energy and sense of disappointment. However, withdrawal means discarding their one growing strength. They have seen a lot of life. Their wisdom has grown. That’s extremely valuable.

Wisdom is for you, primarily. It should help you know how to live your own life. You want to get along with your family members—that takes wisdom. You want to plan for the future—that takes wisdom. You want to experience joy and peace—that takes wisdom.

Unlike most of your resources, wisdom can grow as you age. If you pay attention. If you count your days.

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with God

This is #18 in a series of essays on aging.

My friend Philip Yancey once wrote a book entitled Disappointment with God. His uncle was scandalized and angry. “God never disappoints us,” he wrote Philip.

He was right, of course, but he missed Philip’s point. The problem is not with God, but with us. There is a mismatch between what we expect from God and what he provides. He may offer the very best, but it’s not necessarily what we have in mind. So we’re disappointed.

That comes to a head when we grow older. Because, let’s be honest, none of us wants to get old. Losing agility, strength, and energy was not in our plan. Neither were death and disease. They come, inexorably, as the years pass.

Christians have been told all their lives that God loves them and has beautiful plans for them. They know God’s promise to never leave them. Furthermore, God is a fountain of life; “surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

If that’s your expectation, you can certainly feel disappointed. To aging people who read their Bible, its promises frequently seem far off from their situation. They pray but it seems to make no difference in their quality of life. Such disappointment afflicts people of all ages, but it’s most potent for those of us getting older. Time grows short. Life seems unlikely to change for the better. This is what we get out of life, and it’s not getting any better. Rather, it’s going downhill. We’re loaded down with disappointments.

 Disappointment with God is a natural consequence. Lots of people don’t want to admit that—it feels wrong to say it—but they essentially give up on God as an active mover in their life. They may still find emotional comfort in singing hymns, in going to church, even in saying prayers, but they no longer expect God to make life better. They no longer expect God to show up.

At that point, they need to step back and re-evaluate what they expected of God. It would help if they would read the Bible with these disappointments in mind, asking themselves, what did God promise?

They’ll discover that God promises suffering. He promises all the blessings of the Beatitudes: poverty, sadness, timidity, dissatisfaction. Peter tells his church members not to be surprised at suffering; after all, they follow a Lord who suffered.

The Bible promises an upside-down world, in which the first come in last and the last first. This leaves little room for disappointment. If you end up on the bottom, you got what you were promised. But what a view from there, if we can open our eyes and see!

That is the promise of aging from a genuinely Christian perspective. As we suffer one loss after another, disappointment on top of disappointment, we can come closer to the perspective Jesus brought his disciples when he told them that he had to go to Jerusalem to suffer and to die. We are on that same trip. It leads to glory, but there are no shortcuts.

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Church

This is #17 in a series of essays on aging.

Young people run hot and cold, and that shows in the way they relate to church. They are rarely neutral. They either love it or hate it. At least, that’s my memory. I remember my fellow college students being fiercely loyal to a local church, loyal to the point of blindness. The pastor could do no wrong, and very bright students took his word for things without blinking.

At the other extreme were students who blamed church for half the evils of the world. They were intolerant of the church’s intolerance, and they expressed it vehemently.

It doesn’t look as though anything has changed. Blind loyalty or angry rejection: those seem to be the choices for young people.

You can find those attitudes in older people, but not as frequently. As we age we settle into ourselves, and don’t stray far out of our regular habits. Church, or non-church, is one of those. Maybe at one time, not attending church was an act of conscious rebellion. Not any more. By the time they are old, it wouldn’t occur to non-attenders to go to church on Sunday morning any more than to a strip club.

It’s not terribly different with those who attend church regularly. Are they loyal? Yes, but it’s rarely a fighting loyalty. It’s what they do. They know what to expect, and they like it.

That’s the context within which disappointment with church sets in. It usually begins with change. Music seems to be the most volatile subject: whatever is new or different, whatever displaces the familiar, will certainly upset some people, usually older people.

Any change rankles. The time of service—my goodness, it seems that some people think it was written on Moses’s stone tablets that church must start at 10:00. (Or 11:00, or 9:30. It doesn’t matter, as soon as you establish a time, it’s sacred.)

How about a new pastor? How about a new color of paint? Some people will fight and protest, but most just grumble. Or even less: they say nothing but suffer disappointment. Church just isn’t the same for them.

Old people lose control of the church. Largely, that’s because they don’t want to be in charge any longer. They don’t feel up to attending night board meetings. Tasks like organizing a luncheon or leading a Bible study demand more than they care to manage. In their younger years, they were eager to take things on. Now they want the comfort of church to continue to flow, just as it always has, without their leadership.

They miss the respect they got from leading, however; and they miss the sense of control. For aging people lots of life begins to feel beyond control.

Most carry on. They’ve weathered worse crises in life. Nonetheless, it’s a sorry reality when going to church becomes a bore or a chore. Not quite what you wanted it to be. Not quite what you remember.

Church is meant to be deeply optimistic. It’s based on idealism: that people can gather to love each other and adore God. Love, joy and peace are its aims. Community is its form. Family is its constitution. You should never feel disappointment with church. People do, however. Older people do. Yet they keep going. It’s a habit.

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Friends

This is #16 in a series of essays on aging.

My greatest disappointment with friends is that they get sick and die. You want them to stay close and comfortable as an old sweater, but they’re in the hospital and you’re called on to visit them, pray for them, and assist them—not enjoy them. Worse, they are too soon dead and gone.

Friends in old age remind you that it’s all slipping away. That your life is crumbling. Who wants to be reminded of that?

There are other more ordinary disappointments. You find that your old best friend has left his wife and taken up with another woman, and he wants you to think everything is wonderful. Or, a dear friend takes a turn into nutty politics, which you can’t stand to hear about. Old people have temper tantrums, get jealous, act selfishly, and all the other human foibles that ruin friendships. I don’t think these are any more common among older people than in younger ones, but they stand out more at a late stage in life. At 70 or 80 or 90 you’re not making a lot of new lifelong friends; you want the old ones to stay the same. They don’t.

And there is no fool like an old fool.

As a result, old age can be lonely. You may have children who care about you, which brings an unparalleled, beautiful warmth. Children are rarely a substitute for friends, however. They are from a different generation and thus have a different viewpoint on life. They didn’t grow up on the music and the fashion you did. You were already in your thirties or forties when they first tapped into history and politics. A lot that is important to you passed right by them.

Besides, your children have a peculiar relationship with you—wonderful but mixed up with the traumas of surviving adolescence. You didn’t survive it side by side. You survived it as a parent and a child—terribly different points of view. It’s not the same—it can’t be—as an old, good friend.

Yet just when you need them, your friends aren’t there. They move to Florida. They get dementia. They die. And they leave you lonely.

We lean on our friends more than we realize. Though we care about them, we can’t quite see how much we depend on their presence. Yes, we take them for granted.

There’s no helping this, except to work hard not to take them for granted. Friendships can grow stronger even in your eighties or nineties. Some friends will get sick and die; but the ones that carry on with you will be a more powerful source of strength. As for the ones who get sick and die, there’s fellowship in that, too–for you also are dying.

It is still possible at any age to make new friends. They may be people you have hardly paid attention to. Maybe it’s a caregiver. Maybe it’s a neighbor. Maybe it’s the mail carrier. Maybe it’s your pastor. If you are alert to your own need, you’ll be more persistent in reaching out to them. No, they won’t make up for the friends you’ve known for a lifetime. Still, they can plug up the holes of loneliness, and maybe even open new ways of seeing and thinking.

A good question to ask yourself is: have I made any new friends lately?

The Inside of Aging: Disappointment with Work

This is #15 in a series of essays on aging.

Many people live for work. Some neglect family and friends because of the responsibilities of their jobs. They travel too often or work too late. Left with no time to play with their kids or go out to a movie with their spouse, they become one-dimensional. They have no spare time for the fellowship at church or the bowling league.

Why do they put so much into their work? For lots of different reasons. Sometimes supporting their family requires two jobs. They’ve been raised to believe that it’s a strength test: real men and real women work 60 hours a week (their fathers did). Their egos get involved in who is top dog at the office. They find work emotionally less complicated than dealing with spouse and children.

Stereotypically, this is a male problem. If you broaden your thinking, however, you’ll realize that women often have the same issues. What’s different is that the work they live for is more likely to have a domestic component, with home and children. Plenty of women become obsessively involved with cooking, cleaning, decorating, child-rearing, and so on.

Overworking is not the worst problem in the world. Great institutions are built, widgets are invented, care is provided by dedicated, hard-working people who love what they do. We need the people who live for work.

Here’s the paradox, however. They love what they do, but sadly, many look back at their years of work with disappointment, once it’s over.

When I was starting out in my career, I found it blissfully astonishing that I could write for a living. Simply working with words was enough to thrill me; I would have gladly done it for free. During my years of school I had hoped that I might actually publish articles and books someday, but the idea had sounded like flying to the moon.

Then I did it—published hundreds of magazine articles and dozens of books. I found extraordinary satisfaction in getting to do what I loved. I made a living at it. I believed I was doing good work and I hoped it contributed to our world. To ask for more would be churlish.

I never thought it would end, and it didn’t, exactly, but it changed. The journal I’d published with for decades stopped calling. Book publishers turned down manuscripts I felt sure they would have eagerly embraced at one time.

I still write—you’re looking at one result—but I can’t deny that my emotions are different. I’m thankful and proud of my life as a writer, but there’s some disappointment mixed in.

I think that’s true of practically everybody, regardless of their success. I see two versions of disappointment. One is the result of a bad ending. People get forced out, fired or laid off. The company downsizes or changes direction and they’re not needed any more. If they are self-employed, their business fails or dribbles away. No matter how nicely this is handled, they land with a thump. And at this point in their life, they don’t get to shake it off and move on. They’re not going to make a new start. They will live with disappointment.

A lot of people experience that kind of disappointment, but they’re probably not going to say so. They put a good face on it, and you’d have to be a pretty good friend to be allowed to see under that face. You sense it, though. There’s a weight of sadness that looms out of the darkness whenever they talk about their work.

Another kind of disappointment is subtler. It’s so slight you might not even recognize it in yourself.

Let’s say you end your working life at the top of your game. At the retirement dinner you are applauded and given a lifetime achievement award. Really, you couldn’t ask for more. Nevertheless, when you come down from the rush, you’re sad. It’s over. You have no more achievements ahead of you. No more awards will be given. In fact, you soon realize, people don’t quite remember what you did. It’s not important to them; they don’t associate it with you at all. Your success, whether big or small, is in the rearview mirror getting smaller and smaller.

Worse, as time passes you yourself come to think less of what you did. It wasn’t as important as it seemed to you while you were doing it. It blends into the terrain.

This disappointment seems to afflict everybody, even those who were stunningly successful. Yes, I won the national championship, but not the Olympic gold medal. Yes, people loved my music, but not like they love Taylor Swift’s.

Very few things—almost none—retain much shine a generation later. Not even for you, who did them. Almost inevitably, what motivated you at the peak of your working life now seems distant and perhaps inconsequential.

Such disappointment afflicts nearly everyone as they grow older. A pep talk won’t make it go away. What is required is a new beginning in life, a different career. You need not devalue what you did before, but you have to recognize that you are on a new stage, which has its own peculiar joys and its own particular achievements.

What can you do today that is meaningful? What tests face you that you must overcome?

It could be, for some, that simply acting cheerful and not complaining is a gigantic mountain to climb. To stop feeling sorry for yourself—or at least, to act like you’ve stopped. To give your family members a break.

It could be that a neighbor, a dog-walker, a child is your special calling: to make friends and offer camaraderie.

It could be that writing your memoirs is the demanding task, so that you can pass on the meaning of your life to your grandchildren and great grandchildren yet unborn. How else will they ever know what you really believed?

It’s up to you. What is your work now?

It’s a question I don’t really care to ask, to tell the truth. The achievements of an old man don’t much appeal to me.

But it’s the question you have to ask, in the country of old age.