Pondering Biological Time
“…Graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth By my so potent art. But this rough magic I here abjure ; and when I have required Some heavenly music (which even now I do) To work mine end upon their senses that This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, And deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book.”
~Shakespeare as Prospero in The Tempest
As life expectancy increases, and more people pursue active aging, authors such as President Jimmy Carter and counselors Richard Rohr, Joan Chittester, Jack Kornfield, and Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi are writing books that reveal the virtues of the wisdom years and encourage others to make the last phase of their lives the best and most rewarding. These encourage elders to live an examined life—that is, to process, reconcile, and harness a lifetime of learning. For example, in Zalman’s book Age-ing to Sage-ing, he describes a path to spiritual eldering that entails celebrating past gains; releasing troubling events and maladaptive responses to them; and gathering and sharing a lifetime of experiential learning. This mindful maturing of the past yields the wisdom to be a wise elder.
This guide takes you through one method for combining the personal work of processing your lifetime with the professional processing of a life in medicine at a time of profound change. Although it is outside the scope of this course, I recommend that you begin by celebrating your personal and professional accomplishments to date. Include obstacles overcome and intentions realized that matter to you and to your kith and kin. Reflect on hands well-played, quagmires escaped, and pitfalls eluded. Then, after you have used this material as a tool in your transition to the wisdom years, celebrate the beginning of the completion of your lifework and the creation of your living legacy. During your transition year, keep a journal and record in it your new insights and perspectives as well as your encounters with the emerging paradigm. As you do this, allow the questions and exercises to enhance your bandwidth and knowledge, as that will inform the wisdom years that you have earned.
Eldering is all about time. Time without hurry. Time defined by biology rather than by human folly. This guide therefore begins with three months of letting go of the clocks, devices, and calendars that would distract you from the pace and rhythm of your newly well-cared-for body and being. During this month you can leave behind your domination by late modern social mores steeped in algorithms of industrial engineering and information technology that devalue life and living. You can also take time to allow your body and being to separate from the tools of your day to day employment, and take time to stew your further maturation in the fruits of millennia of evolution. As you allow your most precious gifts of time and attention to read and respond to your body and being, and as you engage your receptive and expressive language skills in discerning your personal baseline and changes, you open the door to becoming more fully human, more alive to possibility, and better equipped to guide epochal changes in your profession.
Medical eldering is all about making the best of life as it has come down to you from your antecedents and from the miracles of generative biological processes that moderns barely grasp and yet presume to control. As a medical elder, you free yourself to solve complex, species-scale problems in their living context. This requires letting go of the modern ways of care and cure that have been formed into algorithms and shaped by thinking that is unqualified for care or cure of living systems and that is hurtling all life toward extinction within the near future, as described in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Elisabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction.
Our juniors are faced with the rescue of life on earth, a feat that no amount of adrenaline can effect—but that contemplation and loving care can. There is no point in saving the patient and losing the species. Medical elders are not obliged to do this, and are thus in a position to prepare the way for those who are. You can speed your maturation as a mentor by gathering the wisdom of Hippocrates, Avicenna, Maimonides, Vesalius, and the doctors of the Scottish Enlightenment. As recently as pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, nature was appreciated by doctors of all eras as integral to care. As an elder, you can allow life to renew you as you renew it, beginning herein with leaving behind any addiction to “busy” and making room in your new life for the future of life on earth.