The Gero-Punk Project

I can’t believe I almost missed one of the most important events of this summer! And if but one more day had passed I might have missed it entirely!

This morning after Izzy left for school and I finished my start-of-the-day routine I decided to do some more work on choreographing the gero-punk presentation I’m giving this Friday at the Oregon Gerontological Association summit, “Generating Leaders for a New Age in Gerontology.” I’m sharing the stage with the very accomplished and knowledgeable Dr. Nancy Whitelaw, Senior Fellow at the National Council on Aging and immediate past-President of the Gerontological Society of America.  Dr. Whitelaw will be kicking off the summit with a presentation on national trends in leadership and gerontology. I’ll follow her, focusing on questions around what leadership feels and looks like – the commitments and sensibilities involved in developing our own and supporting others’ leadership capacities. I’ll be offering some uncommon gero-punk examples to illustrate the ideas I want to ponder with the audience, so if you are attending the summit and have written for this blog or have participated in any of my courses at Marylhurst, don’t be surprised if you hear me say something about you during my presentation! (If you’d like more information about the summit, go to www.oregongero.org. I hope to see you there, if you are local. If not, think good thoughts that we have a great event!)

As I was saying, I decided to work on my presentation this morning. I was feeling antsy with excitement and an overwhelming need to move around while I pondered and sussed, so I captured on little squares of green paper everything about the presentation that was in the font of my mind and then headed outside to mow the lawns, water the garden, and fill the bird feeders. I love writing in my mind while my body is in motion. Sometimes in class I’ll talk with my students about “embodied scholarship,” and I can’t think of juicier examples than working on an essay or presentation while gardening or walking or kayaking, can you?

Any way, I was in the process of mowing the front lawn, making a first pass by the fig tree with my spiffy electric mower, when out of the corner of my right eye I spied an adorable little ripe fig! I plucked it and ate it, assuming it was the only ripe fig to be had, as for after just a few larger ripe figs earlier this summer there haven’t been any further ripe figs, just a bunch of tiny green fig-drops clinging to the branches of what is now a six foot mini-tree (I swear it had a growth spurt this summer, growing at least two feet).

But to my surprise and delight, I discovered two handfuls-worth of ripe figs.

Have you ever seen finer figs than these?

If you know me, if you’ve poked around on this blog at all, you’ll know that for me figs are potent. Figs connect me with my dear friend Fred, who is back in the stars, to our times gardening together. And figs are my favorite fruit in the whole universe (followed by avocados). A perfect meal of favorite items would be a steamed artichoke (my favorite vegetable, followed by asparagus), followed by Dungeness crab or sushi, followed by figs for dessert.  Now you know what my favorite foods are, so if we are ever on a game show and you are asked the question, “What would Jenny consider to be a perfect meal?” you will know the answer and we will win.

The real point of this story (thanks for your patience!) is that I almost missed the ripe figs.

What with how narrow and exclusive my focus has been for the past several weeks on the book project and summer teaching, and my funk and multiple melt-downs last week (I felt like a toddler going through a major growth spurt, unable to understand or describe what she’s feeling and thus incredibly frustrated! Do I need to tell you how difficult it is to engage in adult activities like revising a book or going to meetings when feeling like a toddler?), I forgot to remember to check on the figs, the tomatoes, the blueberries, the basil. I forgot to fill the bird feeders. I did manage to take walks and meditate most days, lest you fear that I completely ditched my self-care routine. But, alas, I haven’t been a good friend lately to the garden creatures.

I almost missed the ripe figs! How is it that something as simple as walking out the front door and into the yard to check out the fig tree — beloved fig tree! – becomes forgettable in the midst of a transient though intense period of stress and fatigue and transition and growth spurts and existential angst? I don’t have an answer right now; I don’t even need to have an answer right now, though you can bet I’m going to contemplate this question on my own and in collaboration with others.

But for now, I am rejoicing in the tangled chain of little decisions and actions that led me from working on my gero-punk presentation to mowing the lawns to beholding and enjoying fig tree and remembering something really important and elemental about this funny life I’m living.

Happy Friday!

I don’t know what it is like where you are, but where I am – Portland, Oregon – it is a wild and stormy day. Rain and wind and dramatic barometric pressure changes (to which I attribute some portion of my existential crisis this week. That, and fluctuating hormones.). I hope the green cherry tomatoes in the raised beds don’t get prematurely detached from their plants, what with all the gusting out there.

I am glad to report that I made it through the week, though I must admit it was a bit dicey there for a bit.

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If you are ever looking for a focus for your contemplations on change and impermanence (and other important ideas, as well), try contemplating the weather.  Remember when I said a couple of days ago that nothing, not one thing, in the universe we live in is permanent and fixed? Well, allow me to introduce to you The Weather. (Right now, as you read this, you are probably thinking—um, yeah. What’s the point?)

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First, a story. I knew a man – I knew him very well – who took it personally when the weather didn’t behave how he wanted it to on any particular day. If he was hoping it would snow and it didn’t, he became sullen. If a cloudless blue sky was in order, but the order wasn’t filled, well—watch out! The entire day could be ruined because the weather had a mind of its own and didn’t fulfill his atmospheric desires.

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Here’s what I know for certain even through I forget it all the time: at least for the time being, in the cosmic history of life on this planet, the sun continues to exist whether or not it is a cloudy day. I may not see the sun, but the bright and shining sun is out there though temporarily obscured by the clouds. The clouds aren’t bad because they are obscuring the sun. The clouds are doing what clouds do. Well done, clouds! And the sun is doing what the sun does—shining on, whether or not humans in Portland, Oregon, can see it through the clouds on this particular day. Well done, sun!  (And another thing to remember—someone, somewhere is seeing the sun right now, unobscured by clouds. I wonder if they are wishing it was a stormy, cloudy day?)

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What’s amusing to me as I contemplate this is the realization that the weather affects me a lot more than I affect the weather.  I’m only half joking when I say that the change in barometric pressure made me come a bit unhinged this week. And remember the story I just told you, about how a person’s emotional experience and disposition on a particular day can be shaped by taking the weather personally?

There’s something really magnificent about realizing that there are certain happenings in the universe that I can do absolutely nothing about, except: behold, dwell, be present.

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One last thing. Though we’ve done our best as humans to confuse the sun as to its place in the universe, and though we tend to say sunny days are better than cloudy days, what happens when we turn our minds to the idea that sun is sun, clouds are clouds, and they both have a purpose? Clouds are here now, they may be gone by Saturday (according to my Smartphone), but you can rest assured, they’ll return. And sun is (at least for now) always there, bright and shining, though temporarily obscured from view by clouds.

One thing I know for certain even though I forget it all the time is that everything is in a state of flux. Nothing, not one thing in the universe we live in, is permanent and fixed. Nothing, not one thing, escapes this truth, including my singular self, including my feelings, though often my feelings — especially my feelings during extreme states of fluxedness when I have a heightened awareness of impermanence – feel so totalizing and enormous that I worry I’ll never be able to distance myself enough from them to see them for what they are: temporary, ephemeral, insubstantial.

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What was that slogan I wanted to remember, the one that’s perfect for times like these? The energetic gist of it resonates…something about…being a child of illusion. 

I may not remember the entire slogan, but I do recall the teaching it is meant to remind me of, a teaching on how to carry my spiritual practice into encounters with reality when reality feels awfully solid and concrete and unchangeable. “Be a child of illusion” is meant to trigger an idea which is cousin to the truth of impermanence: the reality which I am a  part of and creating is always shifting and changing – it is illusory – and it is also open, fluid, and, as the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron likes to say, “workable.”

 When you contemplate it for a bit it makes a certain kind of sense, doesn’t it?  I mean, if reality is fixed, concrete and unchangeable, then there’s not much to be done about it, is there? How do you intervene to change something that you think is fixed, concrete, and unchangeable? Yikes.  I actually don’t even want to think about that, it is too terrible.

But if reality is actually emerging around us, with us, through us all the time, if it is unpredictable and strange because it is more like a dream   — because it is illusory — well, maybe I can work with that. With a lot of practice, of course.

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Today is a big day in my little world.

Today is the first day of my daughter Isobel’s senior year in high school.

Today my mommy moved into congregate housing for older adults.

That’s about all I can say, for now.

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For some reason I just recalled something one of my graduate school mentors said to me years ago. At the time I don’t think I thought too much about it. I was in my twenties, she was maybe a bit more than twice my age, in her mid-life, and when she said it I giggled because it felt mildly transgressive as no one I knew mentioned, let alone talked about, such things.  Before I tell you what she said, you need to know that she was one of the most energetic and vital women I’ve ever known in my entire life, and she accomplished amazing feats in her professional and personal life while living with significant serious chronic illnesses. She was large in spirit and in structure; I always thought she was totally splendid. 

So, we would try to have lunch together every couple of weeks, and one time while we were having lunch we somehow got onto the topic of appearance and body image, probably because my dissertation research, which I was immersed in at the time, focused on older women’s embodiment.  What I remember to this day is that we were sharing with each other little bits of our bodily histories, what it was like to be who we were at the time with our particular forms of embodiment. Some of what we shared was quite poignant, painful even. Insecurities about weight, about shape, about sexual desirability, about the menopause transition that she was experiencing (and that I would, some day), about the social stigmas attached to looking “old,” particularly for women. Serious stuff for us, personally as women and professionally as feminist gerontologists. 

Perhaps to lighten the vibe, though it was the most sobering thing she said of everything she said, at a certain point in our conversation my mentor revealed that what she feared the most, of all the things she feared regarding how her body would change as she aged, was growing whiskers on her chin. And she asked me to promise that if she was ever hospitalized and unconscious or incapacitated that I’d come to her bedside and pluck her whiskers.

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I texted my best friend this morning that I hate being in mid-life. I hate being caught in between.

I’m not ready for any of this. Where’s all my fancy-pants professional expertise now, when I really need it?

What the hell is going on?

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I don’t actually hate it, being in mid-life. I don’t actually hate anything about my life. But I must admit to you that I’m quite stuck right now. Despite what I know to be true about reality, reality right now feels like it is heavy and solid and unchangeable.

I’m probably not supposed to admit that I’m having a hard time right now, am I? But I am. I’m really struggling. I don’t want to be responsible for shattering any mid-life fantasies any of you have, but as a gero-punk I made a vow – and I renewed it recently – to tell the truth about my experiences traveling through the life course. Even when my experiences are, as Isobel might say, “suckish.”

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I’ve missed writing to all of you these past few weeks while I’ve been ensconced in the massive task of revising and updating Aging: Concepts and Controversies, the text I’m honored to co-author with Harry R. Moody. We’re up against a deadline and there’s a lot of good, hard work still to be done, so my mind has been turned in that direction, in addition to teaching my summer term courses.

But you probably didn’t even notice I was gone and miss me, did you!?!?! (That’s my mild gero-funk talking. It will pass.)

Actually, I know you didn’t miss me because in my temporary absence there were so many splendid essays contributed by guest Gero-Punks. Thanks to Colleen, Teddy, and Velda  for holding down the fort for me.

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If I’m ever in the hospital, unconscious or incapacitated, will you make me a promise?

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For the rest of today, I think I’ll try being a gero-punk of illusion.

I’ll let you know how it goes.