Rules for Old Age

A perfect footnote for the previous entry - from teenagers to the aged, a 90 year old Rabbi talks of the benefits of aging in the New York Times today

He distills 6 benefits:

1. Increased Tranquility. “You have achieved in old age what you have wanted to, if you are fortunate,” he said. The important battles have been waged, the decisions made. “You no longer have to do the pushing, the striving, the struggle.”

2. A kind of zen caring. "You don’t rush to quick action,” Rabbi Haberman explained. “You’re more likely to stop and think.” These days he’s hardly indifferent to the world’s problems, he added, but he’s less inclined to think he can solve them, or that they’re soluble at all.

3.“The art of submission.” Americans are activists by nature, but “more happens to us than we cause to happen,” he has found. “You have to accept the unalterable.”

4. Able to consider the possibility he’s wrong. He labeled “liberation from the compulsion to set everyone else straight.” He has loosened up since his more dogmatic youth.

5. Gratitude - “I’m more conscious of the little favors people do — the driver who stops and lets me cross the street, the newspaper man who brings my paper directly to the door,” Rabbi Haberman said. He feels more aware of humanity’s interconnectedness. “I am a zero by myself.”

6. Connectedness to Family and Community.

You can find the full version of his sermon here

Now if only we could figure all that out when we were teenagers, what extraordinary adults we might become!


undated picture of the Rabbi

It's the banker's girls fault...

I read two stories today in the nyt and maybe it was that there were 2 of them, but I feel a rant coming on...

First I read, It's the Economy Girlfriend, where girlfriends and the occassional wife/mistress of bankers were interviewed, saying how their masters of the universe were now clingy and depressed and in the words of one wife (!) 'that's not what I signed up for.'

That article took me to this blog, dabagirls (Dating a Banker, Anonymous) where the comments became more explicit, and the attitudes even clearer. The 'God you are so 24' blog really did it for me. I mean, he's having an affair but he's right - she's complaining that they haven't had a holiday since September and he's telling her he has to lay off 20 people this week... Really, he should just stick to the wife, I don't think his nerves can take the 24 yo narcissim right now (I know mine can't.)

And then we see what happens when these DABA's grow up in the next article - Everybody's Business. The author is so kind when he describes his dear friend, the divorced woman who took on a 2.2 million dollar interest only mortgage (!) that she has no chance of paying off, ever, and has her ex giving her $20K p/month and her current boyfriend paying off her credit card bills and only now she's anxious.

And I just feel angry. What are these women thinking? How could she take on so much debt? If I were in her shoes, I couldn't sleep at night... but that would have been way before September. How could she build no equity in her home? How could she fritter away her children and her future security in that way...

So now I'm still blaming the bankers, but I'm getting angry with their wives/girlfriends too...

(and their added crime - they make me feel old. Even the 40 yo woman in the last article. I felt like an adult surrounded by a bevy of gorgeous, demanding toddlers, and I wanted to send them all to bed to get a much needed reality check.)

Clever words, all in a row...

This is such a clever writing, I'm keeping it here for perpetuity.

Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God. And, in the Middle East, they forget everything but their resentments.

From the New York Times, by David Brooks.