Loving Projects

Old age is life's parody.

— Simone de Beauvoir  

Bruce Willis' family's announcement that the wisecracking actor has succumbed to aphasia is yet another reminder of old age's cruel sense of humor.

Old age "crushes" people, said existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, turning them into parodies of their younger selves.

"There is only one solution," she wrote in The Coming of Age, the philosopher's sweeping essay on elderhood. "That is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning. 

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves."

The specific passions de Beauvoir had in mind were ones that today's emotion scientists would classify as cathected (other-directed); namely, love, friendship, and compassion.

The old can stave off mental, emotional and spiritual decline through "devotion to individuals, to groups or causes, or to creative work," de Beauvoir wrote.

But interests and intentions alone aren't enough. 

The old must have projects: purposeful ventures that "people their world with goals, values and reasons for existence."

Projects, after all, are the things that consume our youth, when we're little more than walking, talking, wage-earning commodities—"human resources." 

Objectified cogs in the global economy.

As soon as we reach adolescence, we're forced to devote all our waking hours to learning, earning, networking and caring—if we're lucky—for a family and a home.

There's barely a second to stop and smell the coffee.

Those projects by default are loving—purposeful and other-directed—even if mandatory.

Purposeful projects in our dotage, on the other hand, are voluntary. They have to be discovered, crafted and tended; otherwise, we acquiesce to sloth and idleness, sleeping the first half the of day, sleepwalking the rest.

De Beauvoir didn't pull any punches when it came to old age.

She described it as surreal, a "double alienation."

We're stigmatized, twice: cut off from youth and from any role in the economy.

Young folks question our worth—and so do we.

A retired newspaper editor told me yesterday that a twenty-something corporate IT trainer once said to him, "You old people are a waste of time." He didn't disagree.

That sums up old age's predicament succinctly: it's decrepit and nonproductive.

"America is the country of young men," Emerson said.

That's truer than true.

The only way out, as de Beauvoir saw things, is to be-for-others, just as we were before we grew old. 

To tackle a passel of loving projects.

If we don't dive into a lot of loving projects, she wrote, we face the very cruelest of fates: "abandonment, segregation, decay, dementia, death.”

We need loving projects—several—just to stay in the game.

Freud, whose influence on de Beauvoir was profound, said it best.

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

NOTE: Read more about the renewed interest in Simone de Beauvoir's 1970 book The Coming of Age and watch A Walk through the Land of Old Age, a 1974 film featuring the French philosopher.

Above: Priscilla, My Mother by Anne Gifford. Watercolor on paper. Spring Corn by Rose Frantzen. Oil on canvas.

Enthused

I thank God every day for keeping me enthused.

— Bobby Rush

Enthusiasm was borrowed by the English language in the 17th century from the Greek word enthousiasmos, which meant "divine possession."

The Ancient Greeks believed that music took possession of you and produced enthusiasm—especially the "manic" tunes attributed to the god of music, Dionysus. 

But age often dampens enthusiasm, as it dampens drive. People reach 60 or 70 and seem suddenly adrift and disengaged from the greater world. They spend their waking hours reminiscing about the past, grousing about the present, puttering about the house, and seeking leisurely distractions to fill the empty time.

So it's inspiring to learn there are enthusiastic folks like Bobby Rush around.

A "legendary" blues musician who won his first Grammy at 83 and today, at 88, still tours the world, Rush performs in front of large audiences at solo shows and festivals continuously.

Last year, Rush took home yet a second Grammy and even published a memoir, I Ain’t Studdin' Ya.

"I have 397 records," Rush told the Houston Press last year. "There's not another blues singer ever lived that has that many records. I'm the oldest blues singer that’s living in the world."

Rush, a Louisiana native who worked all through childhood as a sharecropper, is the product of 1950s-era juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas. Success on the stage quickly took him to Chicago, where he played guitar and harmonica alongside musical giants like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy. He founded his own band in the 1960s, and scored his first hit, the funky single "Chicken Heads," in 1971.

Fifty-one years later, Rush's enthusiasm for the blues is as strong as ever. He spends over 200 days a year on the road. Like Bob Dylan's, his tour is "never ending," and Rolling Stone has respectfully nicknamed Rush "King of the Chitlin' Circuit." He has appeared recently on a slew of TV shows and in feature films and documentaries, and is a prominent voice in favor of voting rights.

In 2017, in tribute to his career, Rush received the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Award, the most prestigious blues-music honor any performer can receive.

"I’m sitting on top of the blues," Rush told Glide Magazine two years ago.

"I’m a bluesman who’s sitting on the top of my game, proud of what I do and proud of who I am. I’m happy about what I’m doing and still enthused about what I’m doing."

How about you?

How's your tour going?

And—most importantly—are you enthused?

Time is On My Side

Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.

— Somerset Maugham

I don't care for many aspects of aging.

The mysterious sore knees and feet and back muscles.

Pretty women calling me "Sir."

Automatically getting the senior discount.

Those things suck.

But one noticeable aspect of aging pleases me immensely: discovering the power of patience.

Without patience, I could never have made painting my second career.

Because painting consumes time—tons of it. (I just spent 30 hours painting a single eye and am not finished with it yet.)

"Patience is bitter," Rousseau said, "but its fruit is sweet."

Why I had to grow old to at long last discover patience puzzles me.

Maybe I lacked the patience to look for it.

Maybe I had no time for patience.

What eluded me, I think, was knowing that patience wields power impatience lacks.

Patience is a weapon.

"Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait," Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace. "But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than these two: patience and time, they will do it all."

I guess all this is a roundabout way of saying that age, if you're lucky, brings with it a sobriety that's missing in youth and middle age. (No surprise, some AA groups recite an "extended" Serenity Prayer that adds, "Grant me patience for the changes that take time.")

English borrowed the word sobriety seven centuries ago from the Latin sobrius.

Sobrius meant not only abstemious, but calm, steady, unhurried, still.

In a word, patient.

Age means, though vastly finite, time at last is on my side.

Above: Five of Five. Oil on canvas board. 10 x 8 inches. Available.