A man was on the witness stand and an attorney asked, “How old are you?”
“Thank the Lord for His goodness, I’m eighty-two years old,” was the reply.
“Would you repeat that please,” said the attorney.
“I said, thank the Lord for His goodness, eighty-two years old.”
“Just answer the question!” the attorney snapped. “No other remarks are necessary. Now, how...old...are...you?”
“Like I told you, eighty-two,” said the witness, “thank the Lord for His....”
The attorney objected and the judge pounded his gavel and said, “The witness will please simply answer the question and only the question with no additional comment, or be held in contempt of court! Is that understood?”
The opposing counsel rose and addressed the court. “Your honor,” she said, “may I ask the question?”
“By all means try,” said the judge.
“Sir,” she said, “thank the Lord for His goodness, how old are you?”
“I’m eighty-two,” the man answered, his face beaming.
We smile at the stereotype of elderly people who aren’t quite in touch with our modern ways of doing things. To the young, the aged are sort of like a separate species, not quite with it any more.
When Adlai Stevenson was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he was a constant target for autograph seekers. Once a small, elderly woman on the edge of the crowd held out a piece of paper. “Please, Mr Ambassador,” she said, “your autograph for a very, very old lady.”
“I’d be delighted,” said Stevenson. “Where is she?”
It’s a good question. Wherein lies age? What makes a person old? What qualifies us as over the hill?
It’s all too easy to evaluate our age against an image of what is supposed to be the case at a particular milestone.
The passage of time is natural. We are all born, age, and die.
Psychological time, however, is something different. When we live in psychological time, though physically we are here in this moment, mentally we are somewhere else.
As a consequence, many of us come to that time in life when we tell ourselves we are “past it,” never having experienced what it is to be truly alive.
Really living is something we’re supposed to experience at some other age. Children constantly receive messages that suggest real living is something that happens “when you grow up,” “when you can drive,” “when you get a job,” “when you get married,” “when you have a family of your own” or “when you retire.”
The emphasis isn’t on what is happening right now, but on a concept of what life is eventually supposed to be.
I was talking to a little guy a few days ago and asked how old he was. His mom chimed in, “He’s four.”
The little fellow corrected her. “I’m not four,” he said indignantly. “I’m four and three-quarters.”
If you're less than ten years old, you're so excited about aging that you think in fractions. Why can’t the years just go more quickly?
Then you get into your teens. How old are you? “I'm gonna be sixteen.”
And then you become twenty-one. You have arrived.
Everything so far is about anticipation. The world is your oysters and you’re set to discover its pearls. Life is about to happen.
But then you turn thirty, are pushing forty, reach fifty, make sixty, hit seventy—and before you know it you are counting in fractions again. “I’m ninety-two and a half!”
Psychological time—what we tell ourselves about the passage of time in our lives—can keep us from ever really living. We go through the motions, but our focus is on what’s coming next. So we miss this moment.
It’s a question of being present in our lives as we live them.
To be present, really alert and aware, is the only way to rust-proof your retirement. This is because, by living each stage of life fully, you don’t enter retirement with the feeling that there’s so much you missed out on.
It is never too late to begin living fully. At any age, Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process, coupled with his CDs, is a wonderful way of removing ourselves from psychological time and coming fully alive in everything we do.
Grace Hansen got it right when she said, “Don’t be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.” Your life can begin right now as you embark on The Presence Process. Live it fully, and you rust-proof your retirement.
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