You Learn Something Everyday, Whether You Want to or Not

My friend Dorothy passed away recently at the age of 79. We didn't know each other long--that's us on our first outing, the annual Seniors' Picnic at Hovander Park last August--but even in our brief friendship, I gleaned a lot about living from her stories.

Now that I don't have Dorothy to learn from, I try to connect with other older people and steal their smarts. I'm not going to name names here, but let's just say that a) there are a lot of people older than me and b) there are even more who are smarter. I'm not even smart enough to have come up with the idea of getting smarter by listening to what old people have to say about life. Someone else thought of it, wrote a book about it, and is now probably not selling his stuff on Craigslist to pay the mortgage.

Henry Alford recently published How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on This Earth),an entertaining exploration of what older people have to teach us about life. Rather than a collection of pithy anecdotes or sweet stories, the book is a memoir of Alford’s visits with numerous elders who have experienced great achievements, sorrow, fame, or simply, ordinariness. Among his subjects are Ram Dass, Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom, Edward Albee, Ashleigh Brilliant, and his own mother—whose life is profoundly affected by her son’s quest for information.

Alford's subjects have plenty of wisdom to offer him and his readers, bu Edward Albee may have stated it best in his play Three Tall Women, when a character says she's wise because she's given up her illusions about the past and future and settled in the present. "Enough shit gone through to have a sense of the shit that's ahead, but way past sitting and playing in it," she says. And that, quite possibly, is the sum of the wisdom Alford gathers from all of his interviewees: getting old means growing wise not because you've collected facts, but because you've collected experiences, which translate into perspective. Alford says this kind of wisdom is "hard-won, forged as it is in the crucible of failure," and cites researcher Ekhonon Goldberg, who says wisdom is a product of the accumulation of cognitive templates--basically, we get increasingly better at recognizing patters, whether they be in economics, relationships, work situations, or whatever.

In addition to talking to actual old people, author Alford spoke with theorists specializing in wisdom--what it is, how people get it, how you can snag some of your own--and found (unsurprisingly) a lot of variation. The best answer came from psychologist Robert Sternberg, who identifies four components of wisdom: using knowledge and skills for the common good; balancing interpersonal and extrapersonal goals, balancing short-term and long-term interests, and "dialogical thinking"--i.e. the ability to see other people's points of view. I might add that the wisest older people I know personally (pictured here are three of them: Aunts Marge and Barbara and Uncle Herb) are those that keep on keepin' on: they take up painting at 68 or still referee soccer games at 69, or continue working at jobs they love until they're 84, like Aunt Barbara.

Alford ends the book by seeking out aphorisms from numerous old people; basically, he's looking for their lives' wisdom summed up in a single phrase. And he finds a lot of it, most notably from Ashleigh Brilliant, the most-quoted writer in history, who is known for his some 10,000 copyrighted epigrams, quips that are generally clever and sometimes corny. Old people like to talk--Dorothy told some fantastic stories about growing up in small-town Idaho, but the end of this book seems to suggest that all of what we learn in life can be boiled down to simple bits of truth. Wisdom, it turns out, isn't necessarily about knowing a lot, but about knowing what matters.