The Gero-Punk Project

I began writing this essay late yesterday afternoon and thought I’d finish it before bed but by 8:30 or so in the evening I had hit a wall. By “hit a wall,” I don’t mean that that I was physically fatigued, rather, it was that my capacity for consciousness had been exhausted—my brain was working just fine, but my mind needed some rest.

My daughter and I had an unexpected (to me) intense dinner-time conversation about something significant that happened recently in our lives which we are still trying to make sense of and recover from.  I was grateful for the conversation with my daughter, it was important and a step in the direction of healing and understanding, but as the evening progressed, as we together and on our own mulled over our conversation and tried to attend to the other things we both needed to do, I felt my mind become less open and aware, narrower and more rigid. I watched myself over-react to a simple request from my daughter, I watched myself begin to spiral down a bit, and, so, I stopped.

I swaddled myself in my down comforter as if I was a precious little baby and I went to sleep.

***

I am endlessly fascinated by how the human — and non-human– mind works. As I explained to my friend Roger Anunsen yesterday (Roger is an expert on brain plasticity and fitness), the brain is totally awesome, but I’m more interested in the mind, and even more so in consciousness.  My experience is that “thinking” is embodied and that what we think about – the contents of consciousness – is at least as important, if not more important, than keeping our brains spry.

I am also endlessly fascinated by the way we humans can think thoughts and feel feelings around the edges of something, but not remember the thing itself

***

As I was sitting in meditation yesterday morning, while placing my “gentle and precise” (thank you for that phrase, Julia K-T) awareness on my breath, one of the thoughts that came into my mind had to do with an essay I wrote in 2006 and have subsequently rewritten several times. Specifically, what came into my meditating mind was a question about whether or not I should submit the essay to a journal for possible publication, and to which journal, and then there was a whole monolog I gave to myself about whether or not I’d ever be able to find a journal that would want to publish my essay.  What I find to be wonderful is that I was able to continue following my breath during this little trip I went on, as well as laugh at myself for going on this little trip, as well as remind myself that such a trip is best taken while not meditating.  Ha! Meditation multi-tasking!

So, about this essay upon which I was perseverating. Transforming trauma, it is called (though its original working title was Exploding brains.)  To date, I have submitted the essay, which is written in a hybrid form — a mash-up of memoir, collaborative inquiry, and critical theory – to three scholarly journals of various sorts. It has faced rejection each of three times. I have also read various versions of the essay to audiences many times over the past seven years; I think it was well-received. I actually wrote the essay to be read by me and heard by others, so perhaps the fact that it is still unpublished is appropriate given the original intention I brought to writing it and the style in which I wrote it.

But, wait— what I just claimed, that’s not quite right. Truth be told, I really wrote the essay to help myself make sense of something – or perhaps to accept the ultimate no-sense of something. So perhaps in the end the essay isn’t meant to be published (whatever “meant” means), but was meant (again, whatever “meant” means) to serve as a way for me to give form to and share with others a profound experience that challenged my capacity as a gerontologist and as a daughter and as a mother, a crisis which reverberated – reverberates — life-wide.

 ***

Yesterday was “an anniversary of sorts,” to use my mommy’s phrase.  Seven years ago yesterday, February 19, 2006, she survived a ruptured cerebral aneurysm.

The essay I perseverated over during my meditation session early yesterday morning centered on my experience of being my mother’s daughter and caregiver after her ruptured cerebral aneurysm. But I didn’t actually “remember” that yesterday was the anniversary of my mother’s aneurysm until I hopped on to FB for a few minutes later in the day and saw my mommy’s profile update (which the time-stamp showed she posted shortly before my meditation session): “My cerebral aneurysm happened 7 years ago today!! I have the last of my MRA brain scans this coming Saturday…if all continues to look good no more neurosurgeons or scans!! Thank you God!!”

 ***

As I said, I am endlessly fascinated by the way we humans can think thoughts and feel feelings around the edges of something, but not remember the thing itself.

I’m also endlessly fascinated by this: There’s this spooky lovely thing that happens when we are interconnected, this collaborative consciousness that develops whereby its seems that what constitutes “mind” is not contained within our physical bodies but spills over the edges and is larger, roaming and wild. My mommy and me, and her mom — my Gramma Jewell– and me, and now my me and my daughter all have a weird kind of shared knowing, under and around and beside “thinking” and “remembering.” Not all of the time, of course, and what we think we “know” isn’t always “accurate,” though what we intuit about the other often has some real truth to it.

Roger, who I mentioned earlier, and I hadn’t seen each other for a few years and have had at best a sporadic email correspondence, but we’ve been tracking on one another in other ways – through relationships we have with mutual colleagues, on FB, because he reads my blog, because I hear from others the positive impact in the world he’s having.  So when we finally got together yesterday for about thirty minutes we had this crazy mutuality of attention and focus—we were enthralled with each other.  The ideas were flying back and forth. I swear there was an energy field in-between and around us—our mutual mind, our shared consciousness taking form.

Two embodied brains exploding, colliding and creating a new universe.

Early on the morning of Tuesday, February 5^th, two days after Super Bowl 47, while I was still in bed and easing slowly into my day I checked my phone for email messages.  I didn’t have my glasses on, it was dark in my room, and I was still in the sleep-to-wakefulness transition, so I was just skimming messages, kind of poking about to see what was what. Suddenly my attention was activated and arrested by one message in particular and when I read it, I had to catch my breath. Let me tell you, I was suddenly fully awake upon reading that Dr. Bill Thomas had mentioned my Gero-Punk Manifesto on his blog ChangingAging.org.  If you don’t know who Dr. Thomas is, you should find out, as he’s a real mench, a visionary geriatrician who founded the Eden Alternative and Green House Project, and a fellow-traveler who thinks about adult aging and later life in really radical, profoundly beautiful ways. I have been following his work for quite some time, he is a colleague of some of my colleagues, and I even helped bring him to Oregon a few years back for a training co-sponsored by the Oregon Gerontological Association. But I’ve never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Thomas in person.

So, here’s the back-story. Apparently there was a Taco Bell ad that ran during the Super Bowl. And apparently the ad provoked some very strong feelings on the part of many viewers, including Dr. Thomas, who felt that the ad was patently ageist. Dr. Thomas was inspired by the “mini-controversy” around the ad, as well as by his own perplexing experience of viewing the ad.

Here’s where I come into the story (I’m sure you are wondering!): Somehow he came across my Gero-Punk Manifesto (I don’t yet know how nor when), and something about it caused him to reflect upon and actually revise his initial reaction to the ad. In his post, he excerpted the Manifesto and wrote some awesome things about what he thinks it means to be a Gero-Punk, and, in homage to the Gero-Punk Project, established a new Twitter hash tag, #Geropunk, as a way to expand and keep the conversation going. Dr. Thomas also encouraged his readers to engage in their own critical thinking about the Taco Bell ad and to enter into the conversation, sharing how they felt about the ad when they saw it, about whether or not they considered the ad to be ageist. (Read the full article on ChangingAging.org).

I didn’t have a chance to really explore Dr. Thomas’s #Geropunk blog post until much later the day it was published, as in between finding out about it and finally getting to read it in full, I had to get my daughter Isobel and myself up-and-going, and engage in a long, busy day. Throughout the day I received email messages, texts and FB posts about Dr. Thomas’s blog post, as well about the “controversy” (including an email message written to Dr. Thomas by my mentor, Dr. Harry Moody, on which I was copied and in which I was referred to, but not directly addressed). Let’s just say it was a surreal experience, as I hadn’t done much more than quickly read the post and skim the responses to the post. My predominant feeling about the whole thing was that I felt quite honored that my little blog had been discovered, especially by someone as cool as Dr. Thomas, and that perhaps more folks would engage with the ideas explored here, maybe even contribute their voices to the Gero-Punk Project.  But I really had no idea what the heck was so controversial about the Taco Bell ad, nor why or how my manifesto was being used in response to the controversy.

Let me confess now that I did not watch the Super Bowl (I did my taxes and re-watched Harry Potter: The Sorcerer’s Stone for perhaps the 6^th time.). Thus, not only did I not see the Super Bowl, I didn’t see the Taco Bell ad, nor any of the other ads, nor the half-time show, etc.

In fact, I didn’t watch the Taco Bell ad until six days after Dr. Bill Thomas wrote about the ad in his post #Geropunk on his ChangingAging blog   I decided to watch the ad because I wanted to understand what the “controversy” was about, as well as to understand how Dr. Thomas might be using what I wrote in the Gero-Punk Manifesto as a way into thinking about the ad in a less reactive, more expansive way.   I also wanted to understand the responses that Dr. Thomas received on his blog in reaction to his post–a mini version of the larger “controversy” seemed to be playing out.

I also figured I better watch the ad because I had been contacted by a journalist who wondered if he could interview me about my opinion regarding the “Taco Bell ad controversy,” specifically whether or not I considered the ad to be ageist.  He wanted an official Gero-Punk statement, I guess.  (In my email correspondence with the journalist, I asked him if he’d interviewed any old persons about their experiences of and attitudes toward the “controversy.” He had at that point spoken to one old person.)

I watched the Taco Bell ad a total of one time. As far as I am concerned, it wasn’t interesting enough to watch more than once. It was just interesting enough to watch just once. I have more important things to do than fret over whether or not the ad is ageist and seeing it once was sufficient for me to form an opinion. With all due respect.

But since I was asked for my opinion – Is the Taco Bell ad ageist? — let me say that to my way of thinking, and I’ve been a gerontologist for more than half of my 46 years on earth, ageism is the result of treating all older persons as if they are the same rather than as individuals — e.g., making a category error, assuming that “old age” or “later life” are such unifying, totalizing conditions that once you are old, once you dwell in the land of later life, you pretty much lose your complexity, your individuality, all the stuff that makes you you.

So, to be more concrete, I’m asserting that it would be ageist to assume that all (or most) old persons are conservative, stubborn, demented, sexless (or perverted), that they sit around reminiscing all day (and are living in a nursing home because they’ve been abandoned by their families). Conversely, it would be ageist to assume that all (or most) old persons were wise, peaceful, generous, and have time on their hands to volunteer and babysit their grandchildren or take vacations. It isn’t that old  persons do or don’t embody these characteristics or attitudes, nor that they do or don’t live in institutional settings or do or don’t have time on their hands, it is that old persons are complex individuals first and foremost, not members of a simplistic age-based category. (And, by the way, age in and of itself isn’t a very good indicator of anything except how many trips around the sun you’ve been on.)

In other words, any way that a human can be at other life course stages — kind, selfish, wise, frail, strong, radical, conservative, etc.– a human can be in later life. And to throw a bit more complexity into this discussion, let me also say that humans experience both continuity and change as they grown older. That is, we continue to be and become who we’ve been earlier in our life course, AND, we can through intention and hard work change and learn and believe and act in new ways until the day we die. The longer we live, the more we experience, the more complex we become; and adult aging and later life ask of us – demand of us – a great deal of courage in order to adapt to our changing embodied selves. We may or may not be up to the challenge, we may or may not have the skills and sensibilities we need to adapt in the face of life-altering changes, but it does not follow that we can’t as old persons learn to think, feel and live in new ways until the day we die. But this is the topic for another blog post. Back to ageism.

Here’s the punch line:  Ageism is a form of stereotyping, and stereotypes can be negative or positive, but whether negative or positive a stereotype functions the same way, which is to reduce complex human beings into types that can be more easily labeled and categorized (and controlled!).  In doing so, or in being done so to, we lose our fantastic hard won self-hood that we develop as we travel through our life courses.  Here’s another punch line: We actually become less alike rather than more alike as we grown older because of the accumulation and synthesis of our life experiences and our deep development as humans over time.

(There are some important and paradoxical questions we will want to ask in the context of future Gero-Punk conversations – When are age and generation important “variables” and when aren’t they? In other words, what can be said about what is special about particular ages and life-course stages? When do individual differences rule, and when don’t they?)

So, back to the Taco Bell ad.  My reaction to my single viewing of the ad was: Ha! Really? Wow.  Well, why the hell not? (And when am I gonna have the guts to finally get a tattoo?)

Not to open a new line of discussion, but we are all of us — young and old and in between, as well as across all income strata — exposed to the same global consumer capitalist stuff (and by “stuff,” I mean “crap.”). Because of the ubiquity of entertainment media and marketing, our lifeworlds are colonized, ala Habermas. In fact, some of my colleagues suggest that in contemporary U.S. and Western European societies there are fewer differences between generations and economic classes than there are similarities when it comes to how we spend our time and money (I can give you citations if you’d like them) because we are all exposed to the same messages about how we should spend our time and money, what we should desire and how we should find fulfillment of desire.

But back to the “controversy.”  For me, the Taco bell ad speaks more to the effects of global consumer capitalism than it does to ageism.  I mean, what is ageist about having real old people in the ad doing wild stuff? Getting tattoos? Partying? Staying up so late that they need to get a “fourth meal”? It seems to me that it would be ageist to suggest that old people wouldn’t do these things, that they’d be too bored or sick or frail or demented to be interested in booty and junk food and transgression.

Think about it! Why would someone who enjoyed such things earlier in their life stop enjoying such things in their later life unless they were told –socialized through ageist discourse– that they should?  And: Why can’t an old girl decide when she is 80 to become a hot mess?

Don’t get me wrong–surfacing, calling out and fighting ageism is crucial to creating a society where all humans can be free of oppression.  However, if I have a qualm with the Taco Bell ad it is that it glories fast food and consumerism, both of which are side roads to hell, IMHO.

Perhaps here’s where the Gero-Punk Manifesto comes in to the story and why Dr. Thomas called upon it in his critical reflections about his reactions to the Taco Bell ad  (BTW, props to Dr. Thomas for enacting real-time critical reflection and thinking for us in his blog post—I loved that his mind changed, and he admitted it!).

My point – and Dr. Thomas’s, too, I think  — is that we would be well served to develop a form of consciousness about adult aging that allows us to think critically about this stuff, that helps us to ask really powerful questions about why we react to things like the Taco Bell ad the ways we do and why others react they ways they do, that invites us be more honest about what we actually feel and think about aging and later life, and that inspires us to think in more capacious, complex ways about aging and later life so that we can all engage as deeply as possible in this really cool opportunity to travel through the life course, changing and staying the same, and using the time and energy that we have for however long we have in ways that are meaningful and spectacular.

By Guest Gero-Punk

Simeon Dreyfuss

Jenny has this way of listening to people around her, and when they say something she thinks might work in her blog, she invites us to write for it. “That would make a good blog post,” she says.  Her ever-lovely smile makes you want to write it.   This is not the blog post I told Jenny I would write, a reflection on how my relationship with certain literary texts has changed as I have aged.  I may still write that one.

In the meantime, she sent me a podcast about a 62 year old Laysan albatross who this year hatched and raised a chick on Midway atoll in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands.  Extraordinary! I thought.  A bird still making babies at 62?  I went looking for more information.

Turns out this particular bird was first banded in my birth year, 1956.  Midway is smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, about halfway between North America and Asia, and 1325 miles west northwest of Honolulu.  A small island, 2.4 square miles of land, Midway is a classic atoll.  In sixth grade I built a series of four small clay models that sat for years on the front edge of one of my bookcases (bookcases now in Jenny’s living room), showing in cross section the stages of atoll formation, starting with the eruption of a new seabed volcano, with coral reefs growing up around the volcanic island as its enormous weight causes it to slowly subside beneath the waves.  In the end, there is a narrow ring of coral islands around a central lagoon, miles wide.  That is Midway (threatened, like all coral islands, by ocean acidification due to global warming), which, 28 million years of continental-drift ago, sat above the same hotspot now forming the big island of Hawaii.  It is home to thousands upon thousands of birds, among them the world’s largest colony of Laysan albatross.

Theodore Roosevelt imagined Midway’s strategic importance, empire builder that he was, and began developing a naval air station there in 1903; at its height from the 1930’s through the 60’s, many thousands of humans were stationed there.  It was bombed, along with Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, and six months later was the site of a decisive naval battle, that turned the tide against the Japanese in WW II.  The base was decommissioned in 1993 and turned to a wildlife refuge, though the Navy is still cleaning up environmental contamination.  In 1956 researchers were trying to figure out why so many albatross were striking navy vessels, damaging the ships—and no doubt also birds.  That research miraculously sustains.  Curious, isn’t it, how we humans learn so much over time, though not necessarily about the often self-interested things to which we first pay attention?   (There is so much we don’t know, which can lead to such thoughtless destruction of things we find, too late, we treasure.  So much it has not occurred to us might be worthy of our attention, if we could just figure out the right questions to ask.)

We like to give the objects of our inquiry names, by the way.  A kind of anthropomorphism, wanting a relationship with the things we study, and relationships often encourage us to pay attention.  This bird is called Wisdom, what we aspire to, so often unsuccessfully, as we age.  And we do not know for sure that Wisdom is 62.  Laysan albatross do not mate and breed until they are seven or eight.  You have to catch a bird to band it.  Albatross are built for flight with their six foot wingspan, and fly they do, pretty much all the time, except when they are sitting on a nest.  Wisdom may well be older than 62.

It is pure chance that, 57 year after she was first banded, that we still know about Wisdom. Tracking bands affixed to bird legs have life cycles—such cycles are the theme of this contemplation, about which I’ll say more in a moment—and generally fall off within 20 years.  Wisdom has had six bands, all replaced before the previous fell off.  Because so few Laysan albatross have a history of continuous banding, we don’t know whether Wisdom is an anomaly or the norm.  Bearing young at 62 might not be so special, for an albatross.

There is much more that is fascinating about Wisdom, but I have other goals in this writing.  I encourage you to Google Wisdom, and learn more for yourself.  This Gero-Punk Contemplation is about something I have learned from Jenny, not about aging per se, but rather about what Jenny describes as being conscious of where we are in the cycles that everyone, and everything, pass through as we travel through the life course.

As it happens Jenny told me about Wisdom the morning after my oldest friend, Eric Einspruch, visited me for the first time in my new home.  I have known Eric for almost 40 years, and we have seen a lot of cycles in each other’s lives.  I live with my 19 year old son, Fergus.  Eric’s only child, Luca, is in second grade this year—Eric came to parenthood even later than I, and I was 37 when Fergus was born.  Eric is an educational researcher and lives on soft money.  For years, one of the contracts held by the company he worked for was a government  funded one for gathering data on drug use in high schools in Washington State.

When Eric came to visit our new home, Fergus finally asked a question he had been puzzling about for years: Why in the world did researchers like Eric think high school students told the truth on those drug use surveys?  He, Fergus, certainly never did.  Good examiner of the human condition that he is, Eric responded to that question with questions of his own: Did Fergus underreport or overreport his drug and alcohol use?  Did he answer with the same patterns about alcohol as he did for other drugs?  Or was he more honest about some things than others?  Did he think his peers all answered in the same way, or did some overreport and others underreport?  Over the years, was his pattern of answering consistent, or did he change the way he responded to the survey from year to year?  In the end, Eric said, he and his peer researchers assume the patterns of how students respond stays consistent over time, not individually, but as an aggregate, the sum results of all answers, and thus the trend lines are valid, even if they suspect an overall pattern of underreporting.  And if the data shows, say, that 40% of high school seniors have drunk alcohol in the last month, or if 10% of all students have considered suicide in the last year, that is enough information to act on, even if the data may not be absolutely accurate.

Later that evening, as we sat over drinks, Eric was reflecting, in the way that grown ups do, on a photograph he had taken though the screen door of my then farmhouse of baby Fergus on all fours, before he had even learned to stand up.  How had it happened that Fergus was now 19, in his second year of college?  And he reflected too about the fact that he, Eric, will be 65 by the time his son, Luca, graduates from high school.

So when Jenny sent me the podcast about Wisdom the albatross hatching a healthy chick at age 62, it got me thinking about the long gestation and slow maturation of humans.  Wisdom will still be 62, or maybe 63, when her hatchlings are fledged and on their own.

Now, Jenny has written in the Gero-Punk Project about her daughter Isobel, and her mother Susie, and the place she finds herself in her own travels through her life course.   And she has written about the curious way in which our four footed friends, in her case her enthusiastic canine companion, Happy, have life courses different in duration than do humans, how odd it is to look in their eyes and see that while they were once younger than us, they are now older, and looking back with their own version of the wisdom of age.

But thinking about Wisdom the albatross and her hatchling, and Eric and I and our boys, or in my case young man, I was struck by how the path of the life course, the turn of the cycle, may be the same—birth, maturation, bearing and raising young, and perhaps the perspective that comes with age—but the way those cycles lay over each other are different.  I was thinking about how the cycle of rearing young for so many species lays differently over the life course than it does for us.

When we say someone or some thing is 62, what we mean is that they have lived on this planet for 62 cycles of our planet around our sun.  And because of the tilt of our planet’s axis and the different amount of the sun’s warmth that soaks into the surface, that is 62 passages of seasons, hotter and colder, 62 bursts of spring growth, 62 summer blossomings the plants setting fruit, 62 falls as plants move toward dormancy, 62 inner months of contemplation.  But in the mountainous high country here in the Northwest, which Eric and I so like to visit, those cycles are compressed, the entire turn of the wheel—bloom, fertilization, and seed—pushed together between July snow melt and the dusty parched heat of August.  Same cycle, laying differently over the year, as the rearing of an albatross lays differently over a life course from the rearing of a human.

Everything has its cycle, whether living things, or navy bases, or the decay of a tracking band affixed to a bird’s leg, or even volcanic islands that form and sink back beneath the sea.  Wheels, and wheels over wheels, and the earth spinning around our sun, and the eventual fiery death of the sun itself, as a red giant, planetary nebula, and then white dwarf star, in a universe that must be cycling in its own way—everything else does, though what we understand as meaningful cycles of time is a matter of perspective.

Jenny too is an asker of questions, like my friend Eric.  Questions are good for helping us figure out what is worthy of our notice.  The right questions might lead to wisdom, or at least a life more in tune with the things we value.  These are a few of Jenny’s favorites: What is the experience of traveling through the human life course with/in a particularly body?  How do we know we are aging?  Where does age and aging reside within human consciousness, and how is this consciousness experienced in an embodied way?  Perhaps it all comes down to the practice I learned from Jenny, identified near the middle of this post: being conscious of where we are in the cycles that everyone, and everything, passes through as we travel through the life course.

Here’s to the work of paying the right kind of attention to the things which matter, in those resonant ways from which we might learn.

Simeon Dreyfuss is Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Liberal Arts Core at Marylhurst University, in Portland, Oregon.