A Day in the Life of an Elderly Gentleman

I slept beautifully last night, reading a Michael Connelly novel and drifting off to sleep, feeling comfortable and satisfied with my lot.    No heartburn to wake me and only once having to grudgingly slip out of bed at 2:30 and heading to the john, as old men do. And then, as if to compensate for the misery of being upright in the middle of the night, indulging in the extraordinary taste of a few sips of cold, cold water. 

Then Sunday morning, always a treat.  Franny and I sit, side by side, reading the Sunday Times and the Sunday Globe.  Commenting, sometimes in coherent sentences, sometimes in grunts, which we understand almost as well as the words.  OK, it’s less fun than it used to be because so much of the news is so appalling that I rush through where once I lingered.  Still, the sunlight filters gently through the trees and I search for a group of passing deer who, every time, thrill me as they prance by our window.  And the gradually warming heat, turned down for the night, and now coming into its own, warms us. 

Midmorning: a very dear and close friend calls to tell me about new dangers in his diagnosed cancer.  I ask if there is something I can do.  He is warmed by my offer but, of course, doesn’t accept—as I wouldn’t accept.  We still can’t let go of that old male spirit of independence.  Still, the concern is there in the offer.

As I closed the phone, I was shaken.  Franny and I let go of the newspaper to speculate about my friend’s treacherous condition.  After a while, we try returning to the news but find it neither diverting nor even bearable.  So I go to my office to play a few games of Sudoku, finding myself a little more patient than usual and completing the puzzles in better-than-usual time.  That feels a little, but bearably, sinful. 

As I play, another close friend calls and speaks to Franny about her siblings, both suffering from cancer—at the same time.   It doesn’t seem fair, we mumble.  And that immediately brings my brother and sister to mind.  He died a year and a half ago of pancreatic cancer.  She waited another nine months for her death.  And now there are fewer and fewer people to talk with.  I had talked with each of them almost every week since I went off to college about 63 years ago.  It’s not that I don’t have friends.  I do and they’re very important to me.  It’s the automatic conversation with well-worn and generally comforting themes that my siblings and I shared.  They are gone. 

Franny is distraught after speaking with our very dear and old friend.  We talk a bit.  I begin with some comforting comments but soon let them drift into what I’ve been feeling so much lately: This is our life.  There’s nothing exceptional, nothing strange about people dying or growing disabled or being terribly sick.  The world, as we have known it, is drifting away.  This is now our world—or, at least, a big chunk of it, a chunk that can block the sun, if we let it. 

The world is also falling apart.  We move ever closer to either chaos—even if Trump and other Republicans lose, they won’t concede—or to dictatorship.  All of that is terrible but, for me it is also intensely personal.  I have never separated my own from my nation’s fate.  And when we stop moving towards a just society, it feels like I’m sick.  The cancer in the nation’s soul feels like the cancer in my friends’ bodies, and the ones that just destroyed my brother and sister.

Sometimes, when absorbed in these images, I feel abandoned.  Sometimes angry.  Sometimes lost.  But most of the time I feel alright.  I’m not devastated by my losses.  I turn my attention to the people I’m with, the work I’m doing, the books I’m reading, the music I’m listening to.  And I lose myself in them.  If I stop to think, the sadness returns but, again, I’m not devastated. 

These experiences join with my own illnesses, my regular losses of footraces to my seven year old granddaughter, and my absentmindedness.  Franny and I say that we’re lucky we have each other to remember the title of a song or a book.  But these days, the losses don’t preoccupy me most of the time.  They are the earth that I walk, the sea that I swim in. 

In spite of this ability, this tendency, this inclination to move on, to lift myself from a preoccupation with losses and pain, I’m a little embarrassed to admit it.  Holding on to them, deep mourning, even times of paralysis seem like better form.  They fit better in all the moving stories we’ve been raised on.  They seem noble.  But, but, I believe that I’m ready—I hope that I’m ready—to let go of that deep cultural narrative of grief.

Last time I wrote, I tried to describe the realistic optimism that Donniel Hartman had proposed, and this, I believe, is a form of that.  I have stopped thinking of these events as exceptions to the rule.  Rather they mark the terrain I live in.  And I am very grateful to still be living here, walking about, hanging with people I love, coaching inspiring young nonprofit leaders, and watching my grandchildren grow, even when the 14 year old teases me about how short I’ve become. 

Realistic Optimism: Leadership in Hard Times

On Tuesday night, I attended an interview with Donniel Hartman, a highly regarded Israeli public intellectual.  Hartman is a pluralist in a land of supercharged opinions and I expected as moderate a take as possible on the roiling Israeli-Gaza conflict. 

Much to the dismay of the rabbi interviewing him and, I think, much of the audience, Hartman said very little about the war, itself—the shock and horror of October 7 and the terrible war to follow.  He had already claimed in his weekly podcasts that Israel has a right to defend itself, that his heart breaks each time an Israeli soldier is killed in combat.  But Hartman also has a commitment to working with Palestinians and, for this moment, he had nothing critical to say about the their participation in the war and he made clear his empathy for the average Gazan families caught in the crossfire.  

Instead, he lectured the Israelis, though not in a way that we expected.  He told us that Israelis had grown too comfortable, “as though they lived in Sweden.”  Comfort and letting down their defenses was, according to Hartman, a very poor choice in such a dangerous neighborhood.  Israel is and has long been surrounded by Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and others who, from the start of Israeli nationhood, have been hostile to its existence.  That hostility, Hartman said, is a basic fact and straying from facts into the land of longing is always a mistake.   

But Hartman did not follow that observation with rage or a desire for retribution—or a sense of defeat.  He acknowledged the tragedy, the shock and losses of October 7, but that was in the past, he declared.  Unlike his American followers, he—and, he claimed, most Israelis—was done with mourning.  He was done with rage.  He was ready for a sober assessment of the situation. 

It was a time for strategy, unencumbered by whatever Israelis wished had happened or even what could happen in the best circumstances.  It was a time for sober analysis in order to build the best possible plans.  Not perfect plans, not vengeful plans, but realistic plans to reach towards relative—and only relative—safety within five to ten years. Israel, Hartman insisted, would not destroy Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Yemen.  Those, he maintained, were simply Netanyahu’s talking points, political declarations that pointed in a false direction.  A direction that weakened instead of strengthened Israel. 

Strategy begins, Hartman insisted, with a clear estimate of the situation.  Israel would have to both build up its defenses and its surveillance capability.  It would need to be as strong as possible but—and here was the essence of his analysis—it would also have to learn to live with the situation—as it is.   

He called his attitude realistic optimism.  Over and again, he said “I’m an optimist, a realistic optimist.”  Being realistic gave him the best chance to devise effective strategy and effective defenses.  Realism kept you ready. Being ready, not leaping in all directions, allowed Hartman to live in the present.  To embrace his children, grandchildren, friends, and colleagues. 

The clarity of Hartman’s vision, the lack of rage and the odd combination of acceptance of danger and readiness to fight with no need for revenge seemed to shock many in the audience.  At least I think it did.  It certainly stunned—and delighted me.

In addition to his political wisdom, Hartman’s perspective provided a great lesson for me about aging.  It said to me: be realistic; you won’t get better; you will decline; that’s natural.  Your friends and relatives will grow ill, more limited, and die.  What else can happen.  You should take care of yourself and others as best you can, knowing that you won’t solve all the problems or relieve all the pain and anxiety.  And—this is the second key of realistic optimism—you need to find satisfaction and joy where it is.  Now.  Not in spite of troubles but in the midst of troubles.  In the dangerous neighborhood of troubles. 

I also believe that Hartman was offering a lesson in leadership.  At the end of the lecture, almost everyone stood and cheered—even though Hartman hadn’t told them what they expected or even wanted to hear. I think they expected an opportunity to vent, to mourn, to justify.  He refused. 

Instead, like Camus’ Sisyphus, he told them to live (and fight)—in spite of how absurd and dangerous the world is.  You might remember that Camus developed his philosophy in the midst of the Nazi conquest of France and while fighting in the treacherous world of the French Resistance.  Every time Sisyphus, his mythic anti-hero, pushed the rock up the mountain, it fell and fell again, but still Camus affirmed his efforts.

What else can we do if we are to remain human and ethical and find joy in the midst of both absurdity and tragedy. So I will push the rock, as well. 

Having said this, I confess that I am still struggling to understand Hartman’s lesson for leadership.  It has something to do with how he refused to tell an expectant and adoring crowd what they wanted or expected to hear and still got them to cheer as one—to coalesce, to let go of their difference, to be uplifted by his extremely sober message. 

Hartman is traversing the country, talking with American Jews.  Maybe he was tired.  He was not particular eloquent.  He struggled for words.  Maybe in his weariness he skipped lecturer’s stance and spoke to us, person to person.

He clearly wants to offer us something he believes will help.  It does. He says it over and again—with passion.  And eventually, his relatively inarticulate mutterings grow incredibly articulate.  I felt what he was saying before I understood it.  I felt at one with him.  Then, as I looked around, I felt at one with the congregation.  And we had all moved to a new place vis a vis Israel and ourselves.  It was like listening to an ancient prophet.

Hartman repeated this lesson over and again.  He ignored questions from the interviewer.  He refused to moderate.  And the more he did, the more he seemed to create a still center, a center that admitted almost all of us, pulled us in, no matter where we had started our journey that evening.   

We need that kind of leadership in America today.  We are divided.  We want solutions, often easy ones.  But they don’t exist.  We need to face the terrible state we are in: angrily divided by culture, religion, political views.  We want answers now.  Kick Trump out.  Or, from the other side: a dictator who will bring everyone into line.  But there will be no simple and short term fixes to the divisions and hysteria that plagues our nation.  We need to face that fact, do the best we can to bring out a good enough resolution to our differences—not a perfect resolution, maybe not even a lasting one, but one that will hold long enough to begin working things out.  And, while we work things out, live decent lives. 

And we need a very personal, passionate, and compassionate style of leadership to create a still center in which we can come together.