Calling someone an old soul says they’re wise before their time.
It has nothing to do with age. A child can be an old soul. But if there’s One Big Thing that happened this year, it’s how the idea of being ‘old’ is changing and how quickly we should move to catch up to it.
I know a writer who’s 84. You know her too. Since turning 80, Margaret Atwood’s written five books, among them The Testaments, volume 2 of The Handmaid’s Tale, which won The Booker Prize and whose TV version won 15 Emmys.
Keith Richards is 80 and Zubin Mehta is 87, still conducting. And Martin Scorsese, 81, directed what many claim is the best film of this past year, Killers of the Flower Moon. And Clint Eastwood is 93 and has directed 10 films since he turned 80.
You might shrug and say 5 people in a world of 8 billion does not a summer make. True, these aren’t just old people. They’re super-old people, not on anyone’s bell curve.
Many years ago, Winston Churchill likened oldsters like this to a dancing bear. It’s not that the bear does it well, it’s that he does it at all.
Twenty years ago, The Boston Marathon created a category for runners aged 80 and over. Last year’s winner, Myung Joon Kim, ran it in 4:12:55, a time many runners half his age would be proud to clock.
So our view that keeping your skills and purpose is only for the rarest of old people is changing. But for hundreds of millions of senior citizens, it’s not changing fast enough to keep them from plodding on the margins, victims as much of ageism as the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
So we can intervene to speed up that change, and make old age less a waiting room and more a supermarket.
One small way we can start that process is by handing out ‘Most Promising’ Awards to old people.
Since forever, high promise was reserved exclusively for the young. The more years ahead of you, the more promise you had. Even a Rhodes Scholar is said to be someone who once had great promise.
But as our world grew older and more capable, that promise of having a useful future started to seep down into middle age. So it’s no surprise that The Writers’ Trust has an award for the Most Promising Mid-Career Writer. It’s in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions.
Today, the idea of a promising future is starting to spill over into old age. True, when you’re 80, the recognition is large and the anticipation is small. But the trend is your friend here. If 80 is the new 70 today, think what genetics, AI and cleaner air will make it 30 years from now.
But happily, one thing won’t change then, and never should. W.B. Yeats was just 26 when he wrote about it in 1893 in “When You Are Old”.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Meanwhile…
1. NORAD’s Santa Tracker began with a typo. You can track Santa here and hear how this tradition really started. Oh and look over here! And here, too!! Isn’t the internet kul?!
2. Three best movies of 2023. From New Yorker film critic, Richard Brody. Plus Emma Stone dances in Poor Things with Mark Ruffalo. Plus, how Love Actually changed Bill Nighy’s career overnight. Plus the 50 best Christmas movies.
3. 21 die in Chinese ultramarathon. People die running marathons all the time. But two years ago 21 Chinese runners died doing the Gansu ultramarathon (100 km), out of 172 runners in total. Most of them were felled by hypothermia when a sudden cold front mixed with rain and high winds. This week, five civic officials who planned the event were sentenced to jail with terms ranging from 3 to 5 ½ years by a court in Gansu.
4. How to start your own media company. The opening para says it all. “Please do not do this. This is a bad idea. We are qualified to say this because we have done it. As founding members of two new, worker-owned media companies (Discourse Blog and Defector Media), we are begging you not to do this. Maybe open a bakery, or open a dog sanctuary, or even go back to law school! If it is too late for you — if you (like us) did not heed this warning and stuck by your silly little dreams of making the media ecosystem a healthier, more interesting place — then at least don’t repeat the mistakes others have made before you.”
5. Naomi Klein vs. Bill Maher. Two very different views on antisemitism, one from the Canadian social critic and one from the American talk-show satirist. Your vote?
6. Erectile Dysfunction. Maybe time to give it a shot. Meanwhile, coffee doesn’t cause colorectal cancer, but problem-gambling spikes long-term disability. And what’s the best diet of the year past? The Mediterranean Diet, of course.
And the best pastries? Canada has only one in the Top 100, Beavertails.
7. The best interview of the year about the best book of the year. (If you hit a New York Times firewall, try this longer interview. Oddly, the author and the subject matter are both Canadian.
8. Not the sound of silence. More like the sound of fascism when, in 2021, President Trump tried to pressure a Georgia official to overturn the state’s election results. Let’s listen in.
Speaking of recordings, here are the oldest recorded voices in the world.
9. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. It came to the Catholic Church this week with the Pope’s edict that priests can bless same-sex marriages, except don’t call it that; and last week the US Congress ordered the National Archives to release all documents on UFOs, not by the end of the year, but within 25 years, and it halted any further disclosure.
10. What does a conductor actually do? It’s much more than waving your hands.
Then again, the Dutch waltz master André Rieu conducted a concert to teach Dutch children how to perform CPR resuscitation. He’s a big fan of “Rieususcitation” and wanted to pass on the skills.
Next, have a British Christmas.
Finally, a quick route to a Harvard degree.
11. What I’m liking. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from running for office. Here’s that decision in its own words.