I’ve been reading a book called Counterclockwise, written a few years ago by Ellen J. Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and an award-winning social psychologist. Its theme is “Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility,” and it’s a heartening book for seniors to read. For now I just want to make a note of one chapter. It’s about “priming” older adults with either positive or negative aging stereotypes and how this can affect their morale and even their health.

Quoting a study by psychologist Becca Levy and her colleagues in which two groups of women were subliminally “primed” with separate lists of words about aging, here are the words on the negative list: Alzheimer’s, confused, decline, decrepit, dementia, dependent, diseases, dying, forgets, incompetent, misplaced, and senile.

And here is the other list, the positive one: accomplished, advise, alert, astute, creative, enlightened, guidance, improving, insightful, sage, and wise.

Did it make a difference in the study, being primed with words that make people feel helpless and useless versus being primed with words that give them a sense of wisdom and self-respect and having a lot to offer? Yes, it did, and I think I’ll post that good list where I can see it now and then.

Ellen Langer has written other books and is highly thought of for her work in the field of psychology. Right now I’m also reading the 25th Anniversary Edition of her book Mindfulness, written in 1989 and updated in a long preface to the new edition. Her use of the title word has little to do with its association today with meditation; she’s more about learning to trust and respect your own mind rather than believing everything you’re told, even by experts. I didn’t read the original edition but I’m learning a lot from this one. This has been more of a reading week than a writing one.

These are the conditions of everyone’s life:

There is always too much to do.

We are prisoners of what is happening to us, who we’re surrounded by, our health or sickness, wealth or poverty, family traits and emotions and conditions.

We are prisoners of our era, of what is known so far, of what is accepted as truth, of what is happening in the world and in the place where we live.

We’re prisoners of our flaws.

We’re prisoners of our bodies, their needs and demands and limitations.

And the same with our brains and traits and all that has influenced them, our superstitions, our self-concepts. What chance remark fixed a certain aphorism in our thinking so that we live by it from then on? What insult cracked our confidence forever?

We’re prisoners of everything we have done in the past, everything that’s happened to us, that has brought us to where we are at this moment.

But we who have lived a very long time are now looking back and seeing where we have been. We are set free in a new way, beginning to see new patterns and new truths that we couldn’t have seen before.

Old old age. What an adventure! What a gift!

A few months ago, I started having optical illusions—seeing things that weren’t there. For instance, when I was reading, images of flowers or vines or little colored feathery things would show up on the page exactly as though they were illustrations; in fact they looked like illustrations from a child’s picture book. They didn’t interfere with my reading, they just looked pretty, but they weren’t really there. Was this a new and fearsome stage of my glaucoma? I didn’t really think I was going crazy, but what was going on?

Then I started seeing the images in other places too. I might see a life-sized vine growing up from a planter on my deck, climbing the wall, coming through the picture window into the living room, winding around light fixtures and draping over the television set—and sometime later I would realize it was gone. And almost always, whenever I’m reading or writing, whole gardens of plants or vines will be on the page at least part of the time. In fact, there is a ferny plant of some kind in front of me right now as I type: lush green leaves, pinkish-white stems, all waving in a breeze that I can’t feel.

There was never anything alarming about the images—except, of course, their existence. Where were they coming from? What was the matter with my eyes, with my brain? Nothing I found on line about glaucoma mentioned anything like this.

Finally the other day I asked Google a different question. Without mentioning glaucoma, I asked What does it mean when I see things that aren’t there?

I was instantly rewarded with an explanation by the Discovery Eye Foundation, in the form of an interview between an eye doctor and a patient asking this same question. The patient was hesitant, afraid his hallucinations were a symptom of early dementia. But the doctor assured him they were not. Instead they were something called Charles Bonnet Syndrome after the doctor who had first identified it many years ago, and it is relatively common (between 10 and 40 percent) among patients who have “low vision” such as from macular degeneration (which I have had for many years).

The doctor listed six characteristics that will tell the patient it is this syndrome: (1) The images occur when you are fully conscious and wide awake, often during broad daylight; (2) You are aware that they are not real; (3) They occur in combination with normal perception; for example, you may see a sidewalk clearly but find it covered with dots, flowers, or faces; (4) They are visual only and do not occur with any sounds or other sensations; (5) They appear and disappear without obvious cause; and (6) They are amusing or annoying but not grotesque.

After all my anxiety, I couldn’t have made up a better, happier, more satisfactory answer for myself! I can’t imagine why I had never heard of this syndrome before in all my years of going to eye doctors. In the first place, how can this phenomenon happen? And in the second place, when something seems so miraculous, why isn’t it common knowledge?

Anyway, I’m just going to enjoy these lovely and surprising pictures that decorate my life these days. They remind me that every now and then, there’s nothing to worry about.

RECLAMATION (the reclaiming of desert, marshy, or submerged areas or other wasteland for cultivation or other use.) (Dictionary.com)

There is a special wisdom in very old age, and it’s too easy to discount it when what it really is is a rare privilege. Don’t let other people’s attitudes negate it for you. You can have epiphanies at any age, you can have a new life at any age. Don’t let a false resignation keep you from using what you are learning. Don’t let assumptions (yours or other people’s) keep you from incorporating new beliefs, new habits, new ideas, and new ways into your life; it can be just as exciting now as when you were young, though in a different way. A braver way. A more seasoned way.

Of course the end can come at any time to cut off your progress, dash your hopes, but on the other hand you may have years still ahead, and in any case you will have had this bonus. Making it work with your old-age disabilities and losses is part of the challenge.

Matching your energy to your necessities is part of it. I’m trying to remember all the common sense things I already know. Eat right (whatever that means to you). Sleep when you need to. Love the things that make you cheerful, and never feel like you don’t deserve them.

Realize that everything you read and watch and hear isn’t necessarily true. Very likely your experience and wisdom are more reliable on many subjects than what you’re reading anyway.

Run things by your own personal worthiness index before you spend time on them. You can make deliberate, drastic new changes in what you expect of yourself if it enables you to renew your life and allow for what you know is important to you.

Don’t surrender too easily to the sweeping competence of the young. Weigh the value of their youth and savvy against your longer experience and comprehension and figure out what you believe and respect.

And enjoy your own company. We cherish the help and companionship we can find; we need it. But we can also take an independent kind of pride in navigating an age we thought we might never get to.

My eyesight is failing fast. For years I have had both macular degeneration and glaucoma, but my eye doctor and I have kept them at bay with twice-daily drops and special vitamins. Now I’m having more trouble reading and watching TV. Two of my near ancestors were blind in old age. So I’m thinking about what my life will be like if my sight goes before I do. Writing is what I would miss the most; it’s how I think, maintain my equilibrium, make sense of life or concede that I can’t. I’m so used to finding words for my thoughts and reading them back that I don’t know how I could remember them otherwise. And that’s not even talking about the lists I jot down every day and depend on to organize my life. Continue reading →