Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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Life would be richer, students of aging agree, if a wider repertory of activities were encouraged throughout life. Almost everyone now marches together in a sort of lockstep. They spend years in school, years at work and years in retirement. Youth might well work more, the middle-aged play more, and the older person go back to school. Former HEW Secretary John Gardner wants to see "midcareer clinics to which men and women can go to re-examine the goals of their working lives and consider changes of direction. I would like to see people visit such clinics with as little self-consciousness as they visit their dentist." As Psychiatrist Robert Butler puts it: "Perhaps the greatest danger in life is being frozen into a role that limits one's self-expression and development. We need Middle Starts and Late Starts as well as Head Starts."

To get a late start does not necessarily require a federal program. Many an enterprising individual has done it on his own. Mrs. Florida Scott-Maxwell, who at the age of 50 began training to become a psychotherapist, recently wrote down her reflections about aging in The Measure of My Days. "My seventies were interesting and fairly serene," she noted, "but my eighties are passionate. I am so disturbed by the outer world, and by human quality in general, that I want to put things right as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down."

Old age should burn and

rave at close of day.

Dylan Thomas

How socially involved older people should be is a question in hot dispute among students of aging. Some believe in the "theory of disengagement," which holds that aging is accompanied by an inner process that makes the loosening of social ties a natural process, and a desirable one. Others disagree. Says Harvard Sociologist Chad Gordon: "Disengagement theory is a rationale for the fact that old people haven't a damn thing to do and nothing to do it with."

After analyzing lengthy interviews with 600 aged San Franciscans, Anthropologist Margaret Clark found that engagement with life, rather than disengagement, contributed most to their psychological wellbeing. But not when that engagement included acquisitiveness, aggressiveness or a drive to achievement, super-competence and control. To cling to these stereotypical traits of the successful American seems to invite trouble, even geriatric psychiatry. The healthiest and happiest of the aged people in the survey were interested in conserving and enjoying rather than acquiring and exploiting, in concern for others rather than control of others, in "just being" rather than doing. They embraced, Dr. Clark points out, many of the values of today's saner hippies. Similarly, religion often teaches the aged, in spite of their physical diminishment, to accept each day as a gift.