Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now

by Gordon Livingston

Finally, we are entitled to receive only that which we are prepared to give. This is why there is truth to the adage that we all get the marriage partners we deserve, and why most of our dissatisfactions with others reflect limitations in ourselves.

Most people know what is good for them, know what will make them feel better: exercise, hobbies, time with those they care about. They do not avoid these things because of ignorance of their value, but because they are no longer “motivated” to do them. They are waiting until they feel better. Frequently, it’s a long wait. As much as we try, we do not control how we feel or what we think. Efforts to do so are uniformly frustrating as we struggle against unwanted thoughts and emotions in ways that only exacerbate them. Fortunately, our lives have taught us that certain behaviors predictably bring us pleasure and satisfaction. With this knowledge we are given the opportunity to break the stalemate caused by inaction and its associated feelings of meaninglessness and despair. When people tell me that they feel helpless and unmotivated, I point out that they were able to get out of bed, dress themselves, and drive in to see me. If they can do that, other actions that will make them feel better are obviously possible.

If they say, correctly, that doing things they do not feel like doing is difficult, I acknowledge this and ask if “difficult” means the same thing to them as “impossible.” Soon we are talking about things like courage and determination.

But any change requires that we try new things, risking always the possibility that we might fail. Another question I often ask patients is, “What are you saving yourself for?” In our efforts to be compassionate and helpful to those suffering from anxiety and depression and to destigmatize these conditions, we have equated them to physical illness requiring medication. It is true that the current crop of antidepressants has proven remarkably effective. The downside to the medical approach is that illness in this society is a responsibility-relieving state. The ill are infantilized, sometimes placed in hospital beds, told to take it easy and allow their medicine to work. The implication is that they have temporarily and through no fault of their own lost control of their lives and now have to assume a passive role and give themselves, with the aid of medical science, a chance to heal. While this process is going on, little is expected of them. Unfortunately, this approach can be counterproductive.

Some people are obviously more genetically predisposed to suffer these discomforts than others. While medication can provide crucial, sometimes life-saving relief, people also have an obligation to alter their behavior in ways that allow them to exert greater control over their lives.

The list of paradoxes is endless: the relentless pursuit of pleasure brings pain; the greatest risk is not taking any. My personal favorite is the truth that everything in life is a good news/bad news story. The long-sought promotion brings more money and more headaches; our dream vacation puts us in debt; experience has taught us well, but now we are too old to use the knowledge; youth is wasted on the young. Impermanence mocks us. Our efforts—to learn, to acquire, to hold on to what we have—all eventually come to naught. This is the final and controlling paradox: Only by embracing our mortality can we be happy in the time we have. The intensity of our connections to those we love is a function of our knowledge that everything and everyone is evanescent. Our ability to experience any pleasure requires either a healthy denial or courageous acceptance of the weight of time and the prospect of ultimate defeat.

is part of the symmetry of life that as we age we descend slowly back into infancy. This reassumption of a self-absorbed and dependent status in preparation for death is discouraging for all concerned. How, and how rapidly, this occurs defines what we have learned in our years upon this earth. One reason for our fear of aging is that those who have gone before us have, in general, set a poor example. Most families I talk to see their aging relatives as a burden. The idea that the elderly have anything to give the young in the way of wisdom and life experience is seldom considered. The reason: most old people are preoccupied with self-centered complaints.

Incalculable harm is done to the relationship between the generations by the complaining (often accompanied by implications of neglect) that comprises the conversation of many of the elderly. I know lots of people who have come to dread phone calls from their parents and especially their answer to the question, “How are you doing?” What could be less interesting and more discouraging than a litany of aches, pains, and bowel difficulties, delivered in the querulous tone of those who realize that what they are suffering from is beyond remedy and getting worse?

Our feelings depend mainly on our interpretation of what is happening to us and around us—our attitudes. It is not so much what occurs, but how we define events and respond that determines how we feel. The thing that characterizes those who struggle emotionally is that they have lost, or believe they have lost, their ability to choose those behaviors that will make them happy.

When confronted with a suicidal person I seldom try to talk them out of it. Instead I ask them to examine what it is that has so far dissuaded them from killing themselves. Usually this involves finding out what the connections are that tether that person to life in the face of nearly unbearable psychic pain. There is simply no denying the anger embedded in any decision to kill oneself. Suicide is a kind of curse forever on those who love us. It is, to be sure, the ultimate statement of hopelessness, but it is also a declaration to those closest to us that their caring for us and our caring for them was insufficient to the task of living through another day. People in despair are, naturally, intensely self-absorbed. Suicide is the ultimate expression of this preoccupation with self. Instead of just expressing the sympathy and fear that suicidal people evoke in those around them, therapists included, I think it is reasonable to confront them with the selfishness and anger implied in any act of self-destruction.

When I listen to comments from elderly people who have been married fifty, sixty, or more years answering the inevitable question about “the secret to a successful marriage,” it seems to me that a high tolerance for boredom often heads the list. Such bromides as “We never went to bed angry” or “Moderation in all things” convey a philosophy more geared to survival than to pleasure. Where, one wonders, is the idea of endless, renewable love? If Adam and Eve have anything to teach us with their spectacular fall from grace it is that the union of two people offers us the primary compensation for all the burdens of being human: the need to toil, the “thorns and thistles,” and the lifelong knowledge of our mortality.

One of the things that makes us human is the ability to contemplate the future. If we are to bear the awful weight of time with grace or acceptance, we have to come to terms with the losses that life inevitably imposes upon us. Primary among these is the loss of our younger selves. If we feel gradually devalued by becoming older, then our lives become a discouraging process marked by desperate attempts to look and act younger while we disregard the compensations of knowledge and perspective that should result from our accumulated experience.

As long as we measure others and ourselves by what we have and how we look, life is inevitably a discouraging experience, characterized by greed, envy, and a desire to be someone else.

If we believe it is better to build than destroy, better to live and let live, better to be than to be seen, then we might have a chance, slowly, to find a satisfying way through life, this flicker of consciousness between two great silences.

Though a straight line appears to be the shortest distance between two points, life has a way of confounding geometry. Often it is the dalliances and the detours that define us. There are no maps to guide our most important searches; we must rely on hope, chance, intuition, and a willingness to be surprised.

In some respects every pleasure-seeking activity is a response to our fear of death. As we age and try to come to terms with the futility of our desires for youth and immortality, one response is to seek out experiences that feed our conceit that we retain our attractiveness. What better way to do this than through sex with someone new? A healthy process of maturation allows us to internalize a belief that we are uniquely valuable, and gives us a stable sense of a lovable self.

Because of these consequences and financial considerations, most infidelity is not undertaken in anticipation of divorce, though divorce is often the result. It represents at one level a kind of promiscuity that is evident among nearly all animal species. In another respect, infidelity is a uniquely human expression of fear and longing. The search for ideal love is both infantile and a symptom of middle-aged fears. That it most often fails to improve our lives, indeed frequently devastates them, does not dissuade us from trying. Long ago Joan Baez sang, “You go running off in search of the perfect stranger . . . ” The name of the song was “Fountain of Sorrow.”

To lose that which means the most to us is a lesson in helplessness and humility and survival. After being stripped of any illusions of control I might have harbored I had to decide what questions were still worth asking.

I had to accept the reality that I would never be the same person, that some part of my heart, perhaps the best part, had been cut out and buried with my sons. What was left? Now there was a question worth contemplating.

This is what passes for hope: those we have lost evoked in us feelings of love that we didn’t know we were capable of. These permanent changes are their legacies, their gifts to us. It is our task to transfer that love to those who still need us. In this way we remain faithful to their memories.

Often I ask people in conflict to withhold criticism of those around them to see if this changes the atmosphere. It is amazing how radical this suggestion seems to many people. The thought seems to be, “If I give up criticizing and directing those around me, chaos will ensue. Chores will not be done, dishes will pile up, rooms will not be cleaned, the house will fall down, homework will be ignored, school failure will ensue, followed by drug abuse, pregnancy, and a life of crime. I can’t let that happen!” This is called “awfulizing,” the idea that any relaxation in standards or vigilance is the first step toward failure, degradation, and the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Another way to view the conflicts that arise between parents and children is that they are skirmishes in a long-term power struggle based on the faulty assumption that the primary task of parenthood is to shape the behavior of children through incessant instruction enhanced by the application of rules and punishments. While this approach sometimes works, more often it produces oppositional children who grow into oppositional adults. Passive resistance is the last refuge of the powerless. Assembly line workers who cannot strike can slow down. Children, who are prevented by their small physical and psychological size from confronting their parents openly, can demonstrate their unhappiness by not doing what they are told. Poor schoolwork, failure to do assigned chores, extreme slowness, a tendency to ignore instructions—all are common examples of passive-aggressive behaviors that drive parents crazy. The most common parental response is to persist with lectures, instructions, and punishments in an effort to “get this kid to listen.”

When no other relief is available to us, some form of illness or disability is one of the few socially acceptable ways of relinquishing the weight of responsibility, if only for a little while. Instead of being expected to get up each morning and face tasks that we abhor, we are, when sick, told to “take it easy.” For some people, trapped on a treadmill of obligation, the disadvantages of diminished functioning and physical pain are counterbalanced by the relief of lowered expectations.

Most people, of course, do not think in these terms. Preoccupied by the obvious disadvantages of their illness, they resent any implication of secondary gain. And yet, especially in cases in which people receive some form of relief from work or other responsibilities, it is hard to escape the possibility that this might play a part in reinforcing and prolonging the sick role. It is also true that the longer someone is disabled, the greater the chance that the illness will become a part of a person’s identity—the way we think of ourselves. This is a dangerous development in that those aspects of our characters that we incorporate into our sense of ourselves are subconscious and resistant to change.

It has been a failing of traditional medicine that it has promoted in most people a sense of helplessness in the face of physical illness. This has increased the dependency on and the status of doctors at the expense of a sense of responsibility in patients.

Does modern medicine discourage patients from taking responsibility for health

The rise of effective somatic treatments—antibiotics, surgery, drugs to control conditions like diabetes, hypertension, all manner of hormone deficiencies—has contributed to the sense that healing is something that happens to us rather than something in which we are active participants. This attitude has had the effect of inducing a kind of passivity in those afflicted by physical disease. By the same token, the discovery in the last fifty years of medications that are efficacious in the treatment of anxiety, depression, and psychotic illnesses has created the expectation on the part of those suffering from these conditions that taking a pill will be sufficient to relieve their suffering.

Fear, while effective in the short term, is not useful in producing lasting change. The use of it as a motivator for behavior ignores the fact that there are no more powerful desires than the pursuit of happiness and the struggle for self-respect.

Whenever I go to the funeral of someone I have known well, I marvel at the image of that person that is portrayed in the eulogy. Seldom does their imperfect humanity survive the idealized descriptions that, while meant to comfort, succeed only in sanitizing the life of the deceased. To know someone fully and love them in spite of, even because of, their imperfections is an act that requires us to recognize and forgive, two very important indicators of emotional maturity. More important is the fact that, if we can do this for other people, we may be able do it for ourselves. It is our fallibility and uncertainty that make us human. Our constant challenge is not to seek perfection in ourselves and others, but to find ways to be happy in an imperfect world. We are impeded in this effort if we cling to an idealized vision of the past that insures dissatisfaction with the present.

Perhaps more destructive are memories of “the one that got away.” It is common for people to have someone in their pasts whom they recall with longing and regret, someone to whom they adversely compare all subsequent relationships. This person can be a parent, a first love, or a friend no longer here. Their perfection, like that of a funeral eulogy, is a function of selective memory that can no longer be tested by daily contact. They exist in a sort of distracting dream with which the people now in our lives cannot compete.

we lack the ability to see the past clearly, we might concede that holding on to a romanticized version is just another way of sabotaging the present. When, in the maturity of our years, we sense that the likelihood of achieving earthly perfection or complete happiness is small, we have the choice of accepting and enjoying what we have made of our lives. Or, we can long for a simpler time, when all seemed possible and hope prevailed over our limited experience. It is this state of innocent optimism that we long to regain even as the limitations of time and chance weigh us down. We are haunted by paths not taken, especially our missed opportunities for perfect love. As we age, our bodies betray us and our opinions can harden into calcified prejudice. And from this unenviable vantage point we look back on the Elysian fields of our youth when the possible outweighed the probable in our estimate of the future. It is this state we wish to regain and it is puzzling to us that our memories can be such a curse on the present.

Pessimists, like hypochondriacs, are right in the long run. Nobody gets out of here alive. But pessimism, like any attitude, contains within it a multitude of self-fulfilling prophecies. If we approach others in a suspicious or hostile way, they are likely to respond accordingly, thereby confirming our low expectations. Fortunately, the opposite is likewise true. As with any rule there are exceptions and those we encounter do not always mirror our attitudes. If habitual optimism cannot protect us against occasional disappointment, habitual pessimism is a close cousin of despair.

Smiling is an indication of “good humor,” and represents an acknowledgment of the joke embedded in our common humanity: Things may be grave but they need not be serious.

Somewhere between ignoring the past and wallowing in it there is a place where we can learn from what has happened to us, including the inevitable mistakes we have made, and integrate this knowledge into our plans for the future. Inevitably, this process requires some exercises in forgiveness—that is, giving up some grievance to which we are entitled.

Widely confused with forgetting or reconciliation, forgiveness is neither. It is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves. It exists, as does all true healing, at the intersection of love and justice. To acknowledge that we have been harmed by another but choose to let go of our resentment or wishes for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity. It is a way of liberating ourselves from a sense of oppression and a hopeful statement of our capacity for change. If we can relinquish the preoccupations and pseudo-explanations that are rooted in the past, we are free to choose the attitudes with which we confront the present and future.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.