It would be easy to make a mess of growing old. Old age can bring its own rewards, but enjoying these requires a certain type of introspection.
We are too often exhorted to ‘live life to the fullest’, without any thought as to what this might entail.
The photographer-philosopher Wynn Bullock got it right when he once said: ‘What is important is not what you think about (things), but how (they) enlarge you.’ This blog is about how things can enlarge one.
I’m drawn to things (people, places and stuff) that are capable of engendering the kind of introspection that I call ‘sympathy’ and a kind of recognition that brings on a knowing smile. Lines on faces, the patina on a waxed cotton jacket, the lustre of a brass buckle, fallen leaves in a puddle, old photographs in an album, weathered sandstone, faded denim, the rust on an iron gate.
And then, places with special meaning, mending stuff, tinkering, looking under stones, tending plants, cleaning. Actually, cleaning ends up being quite important in my conception of things.
This blog is about that certain type of introspection. With short texts, video and sound clips and photographs I try to convey certain feelings, avoiding philosophical argument where I can. I do not try to convince you of something. There is already much of that about. I simply try to point to a way without spelling it out in detail and leave the rest to you.
© 2tT, Old broken down car. Bromoil Print, North Dakota, made in my photography darkroom
My family nickname is ‘2 T-shirts Tony’ (2tT), a family joke. I’m a photographer, philosophy student and getting quite old. In my culture, 70 is young-old and 85 is old-old. I’m presently young-old.
I now find myself as a full-time carer for a loved one with Alzheimer’s Dementia. Those that also care for mentally ailing loved ones will know what it is to be thrown back onto one’s self, to seemingly be ‘out of the swim’, alone. We learn to live life in the mundane. But there is a powerful beauty in that, if you can see it.
This blog is inspired by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’:
‘What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.’
[T.S. Eliot ‘Little Gidding’ – No. 4 of the Four Quartets.]
Ageing can come with regrets. Regret comes from loss of what could be, the closing down of possibilities. But this is to see it only from one side. Ageing brings into being its own qualities some of which are quite special.
Themes
This blog loosely looks at introspection from three perspectives: people, places and things, which are introduced in the link panels below.
To quote Simone de Beauvoir at length: ‘Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable. There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.’
~ The Coming of Age