The Crazy Age

Here is an interesting article by Jane Miller on growing old:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/26/jane-miller-growing-old-ageing

What intrigues me most is the idea that, somehow, a narrative can be created for a life and events explained as though there was a reason for every incident of every day of one's existence. It's not like that and I think people are beginning to delude themselves into thinking rationalizing events or circumstances in a life can excuse behaviours. I recently read Mitch Albom's book "5 People You Meet In Heaven" and, while it was interesting, ultimately, it was a justification for all life events and a rationalizing of the connectedness between people. I guess I am not saying that people are not connected and chaos theory alive but what I am saying is that we mistake this sort of belief for a God or faith or whatever. I don't think it works that way.

The matriarch may reflect privately on her life, I don't know; she loves to talk about her first marriage in the thirties and the parties she and her husband used to have. But she left him when she had had enough of his boozing and physical abuse--I wouldn't have thought it the happiest time in her life and, yet, it is the period she seems to reflect on the most. I think you have to have a certain nature and desire for introspection to create sense out of an existence; some people are not like that. It's not wrong or right; but, I think there so many attempts to rationalize existence that attempts at life get lost in the thinking. I don't think my mother-in-law thinks about her own death; I think that is why she loves going to funerals--she is still alive despite it all and loves pointing the fact out to the grieving. (Yes, it's tasteless and tacky and the reason my husband avoids bringing her to funerals but true all the same.) My suspicion is the matriarch doesn't think about God or meaning--I'm not saying she doesn't care, well, actually, I am--but I mean it is not in her nature to worry about such stuff, to even contemplate it. And, I think we live in a world where sometimes that is seen as wrong.

Privileging the cerebral, because that is what it is, applying this narrative structure to a life is not fair. Because, then, somehow there has to be meaning in stuff that "just happens." And, stuff does just happen for no reason at all. I know I judge my mother-in-law all the time and I am beginning to think I do it because I am trying to rationalize the last ten years of my life. It's a long time to have spent helping someone else with their life and I am trying to make sure I have learned something by it. And, I haven't--not really. And, one cannot really make the argument there have been lessons without falling back into platitudes that someday these events will come back to me; I could get hit by a car in the future, die and none of it will have mattered in the long run to me personally. That's okay or, at least, I am beginning to realize that it would be okay. It is so hard to do the right thing when there is no reason, no narrative, no structure. Reminds me of that other book "Can We Be Good Without God?" (just you have to replace "God" with the word "Reason.")