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Literary Review
Facing the inevitable
A PROMINENT paradox of our time is the dilemma caused by our increasing longevity vis-à-vis the predicament caused by a prolonged old age. The tradition of joint family had irreparably cracked during the first half of the 20th Century; the second half saw the steady disintegration of familial togetherness — the separation between the unit consisting of parents and that of the adult married offspring. The manifestation of this changing pattern of living is, of course, much more prominent in the affluent West than in Asian societies, giving a boost to several measures around the idea of euthanasia. But however rationally, jovially and boldly the justification for voluntary termination of life may be put across by its protagonists, most of those who accept it and record their consent to take recourse to it when the time comes, are unable to conquer an accompanying sense of sadness which grows into acute melancholy in some cases.
That is but natural, denial of death being one of the instinctive characteristics of life, a trait that can be explained away neither anthropologically nor psychologically. Mystics have their own explanation: in the core of his consciousness, the human being knows that his soul is immortal. Hence his spontaneous recoil from death and fight against aging, the latter being the prelude to the end.
If euthanasia, as a solution to the problem of aloneness and suffering inevitable to the aged is one extreme, a robust faith in the immortality of the soul and consequently looking upon the phenomenon of death only as an illusion or passage to an invisible world or to the next incarnation, is the other extreme. Those who have succeeded in cultivating the second attitude are a lucky lot, but the bulk of the aged population is uncertain about both the propositions. Faith in the indestructibility of the soul depends on at least some contact with the soul while most of us are creatures of body, life and mind.
Hence the raison d'etre of the kind of book under notice. Age with Spirit, as the title suggests, is a guide for the average sensible man to develop a certain poise, a psychologically sound and creative attitude to the process of aging.
The author prescribes five approaches to the process — She calls them Waves — the first of which requires one to "making the unconscious conscious". In our youth we dream of so many possibilities, indulge in reveries and exercises in wish-fulfilment which remain, for the most part, unfulfilled. It would be good to resurrect them. "We have to examine these dreams in the light of our maturity and decide how we can honour them," says the author. "Opening Up" is the second Wave. It "requires that we take up the challenge of letting go of those dreams whose time has passed." The prescription here is to courageously recognise the impossibility of those haunting desires being met. The third Wave is "Staying in Touch" — an attitude of associating ourselves with all that is human around us despite consciously drifting to the other shore.
The fourth Wave, "Recreating Yourself", is akin to the ancient Indian phase of Vanaprastha. "As we age and leave behind procreation, we need to recreate ourselves. Puberty and adolescence moulded us to be the people our community or society wanted us to be — part of which meant producing the next generation of humans. Aging offers us the opportunity to be the person we ourselves wanted to be." And then comes the fifth Wave, "Turn to Face the Other Way", to develop the habit of looking beyond the horizon, "to the end of all that we know now" — again akin to the ancient concept of Sannyas.
Written with knowledge and empathy, with psychological insight and scientific adequacy to support its thesis, the book will prepare the aged and the would-be aged to accept certain inevitabilities without anguish, though probably the ultimate preparation in that regard would still lie in the psychic growth of a person, the result of personal aspiration and evolution spread over several past incarnations. The work is a welcome addition to the psycho-scientific study of a practical area of gerontology.
Age with Spirit: Five Ways to Embrace Change in Your Life, Swami Ambikananda Saraswati, edited by Bri. Manisha Wilmette Brown, HarperCollins, Rs. 295.
MANOJ DAS
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