A theory that was current in gerontology when I was a young man teaching that course was the theory of disengagement which was not really a theory but only a single proposition rather than the linking of a number of propositions, but never mind that. The proposition was that people as they got older disengaged from their social affiliations and so became more isolated from one another staying in their own rooms or houses, people dying off around them, and withdrawing from friends still living. People shrunk from their social contacts in preparation for death. That does not seem to me an accurate picture of what old age is like, now that I am there from the inside, while other findings at the time, such as that old people are often thought to be losing their mental acuity when all that is happening is that they are becoming hard of hearing, a point which is something to which I can attest, though that might have been a geriatrics insight rather than a gerontological one.
It does not seem to me that old people disengage, even though, obviously, some of their friends and spouses die and people retire from their vocations. But many oldsters stay at work for as long as possible and retire into alternative occupations without remuneration so as to keep active. Oldsters keep touch with old friends and cultivate people of the younger generation and engage in the same things they did while young, which for me was keeping up with politics and movies. Old buddies are precious because they share a point of view and their bygone experiences and are also because they are associated with those people who have died. Oldsters are not just waiting in the vestibule of death.
But there is something deeper that lurks behind the specter of disengagement that explains better what it is to be an old person. People shed their grieve]nces as they get older perhaps because under the light of eternity it is just not worth holding a grudge or because the oldster is no longer in the battles that made grievances meaningful, such as a battle over academic prestige or who will run the corporation, thinking someone else acted unfairly and got the slot you wanted. Old people can accomplish a little bit of serenity because, after all, the winner in life is not the one who has the most toys, but the one who lasts longest while remaining comfortable, because you will no longer have any trinkets of wealth, power and prestige once you are as dead as a doornail even if the Egyptians and other religionists thought and think otherwise, grievances as well as successes reaching into the afterlife because that is iust what happens, is the substance of living life. So people disengage from their bad feelings and only that though not everyone takes advantage of being so liberated.
Shedding grievances is included in religion because it is part of human experience. Bill Murray in that very wise movie “Groundhog Day” says that God may just be a very old person who has seen everything. Like an old person, He gives past grievances because the grievances no longer matter. That is different from the Christian view that elevates shedding grievances into a doctrine of forgiveness, which is to erase past grievances as if they didn’t happen and, indeed, take it as a virtue to abolish the past so that you are a better person for forgiving your trespassers even though it is obviously impossible to erase away a murder or a hurting insult, just find a way to go past it. Indeed, God in the Christian view, does the sublime event of forgiving mankind for its original sin by having His own Son suffer for mankind’s deeds, becoming, as in the story of Abraham and Isaac, the scapegoat for mankind, as if Jesus whatever they were, which might be a tendency to perverseness, which is hardly the most ultimate flaw, and Jesus suffered just a whit, three days in a tomb, for redeeming all of mankind. A mighty cheap bargain.
Think rather of every old person having a magic wand whereby the person can change the world by changing an attitude and so transform other people and oneself into being fully human by forgoing their grievances. And why not? Old people are also free because if they are run over by a truck they can think the pain wouldn’t last long and they have anyway lived out the vast majority of their lives. Old people are therefore invincible even if they are fragile. Nothing much can happen to them and so shedding grievances is a minor part of the situation of being old. Every day is a joy and a vacation.
That doesn’t mean to be aimless. You can still write a book or be nice to people. But those are added virtues rather than what have been the burdens of your identity, what shaped you and what you know to have characterized you. It is all now gratis, a gift more precious than Jesus could offer because Jesus was compelled by his Father to do that.
Make use of this liberation while being old with regard to people in the midst of their lives, full of struggles and things to lose and matters about which to grieve. As an adult, you can be kinder to others, be only moderately competitive, and just neglect the small stuff. Enjoy the breeze while the kids are in the playground. That is not asking people to be saints, which are singular accomplishments of rectitude, but simply the pleasures available to ordinary life. All people want to be pleasant except for those few who want to be mean and even those who are mean find an excuse for being so or regarding themselves and not really mean, though only a lover can appreciate that. That is what David Hume thought and that is contrary to the Christian view which is, deep down, people are just louses, cockroaches, meanies. What can a belief in original sin otherwise mean?
Not that old age is a long set of epiphanies. You are busy managing your pills and being sure not to eat what will upset your delicate digestion. You need not have gone beyond ambition or anger, but those qualities seem to have been stoked. But you can look at the vast expanse of human creation and sometimes say “This is good ''.