Can I Keep Learning?

A couple of years ago while consciously thinking about how to help myself grow old, I realized that it was really important to me to keep learning. This was partly recognition that learning had something to do with my brain health, and that I would need my brain when my legs were already worn out. But it was also acknowledgement that scientific reasons like that are to me just happy excuses for activities that I get a kick out of doing.

So when I chose a place to spend the end of my life, I took a careful look at the planned opportunities there to keep the residents growing intellectually. And now and then something happens here in my retirement community that makes me giddy the way one of my children was when he went running and leaping and clapping for joy, having figured out for himself that if h-a-t spelled hat and c-a-t spelled cat, then b-a-t must be bat. He felt, apparently, it was past time to know that.

For obvious, practical reasons we are behind, all of us, always, in our education. It’s just that the body of things there are to know keeps expanding. Think about it. Once I was a kid, reading the newspaper on summer afternoons, partly because it was sometimes the only thing I had to read and partly because there was this fascinating thing happening: war in Europe that was blamed for personal disasters like my best friend leaving town because her daddy got a job building ships in California and then my own Daddy deciding he needed to join the Seabees.  I sat on the front steps looking at those maps in the Memphis Press Scimitar, trying in vain to understand the moving battle lines, with absolutely no comprehension of why any of this was happening.

A few years later I graduated from high school, winning the history medal, but World War II was not yet in the history books, so I managed to get a B.A. and a couple of advanced degrees without ever reading a book that included the war that reshaped the world I lived in.

Adding insult to this injury is the fact that I was taught in high school that the atom was the smallest division of matter and could not be split, while simultaneously the U.S. was building the atom bomb, 423 miles away from where I sat.

My point is that, because knowledge increases much faster than textbooks, the end result of almost any education is awareness of ignorance that only grows as one ages. And, while I am willing to leave physics to people with appropriate abilities, I would still like to understand how a paperhanger with a crazy idea managed to dupe people as smart as the Germans, how fighting as allies could create perpetual suspicion and tension between us and one of our friends, and how Nazism in Europe could result in the United States dropping bombs that obliterated cities in Japan, coincidentally exposing the truth that the atom could be split.

That is not even all. The war set in motion the long-discussed creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East which seemed like such a good idea until we noticed that Palestine already had homes and orchards and schools and culture and people who turned out to be possessive about the houses and land they had inherited or bought and paid for. And, of course, no one could have guessed that I could myself get caught up in some of the conflict that resulted from that.

This is the short explanation for why I have been happy to have history lessons in my retirement center. In a recent week the subject was the Berlin Wall, how and why it ever existed. A very fine history teacher, using pictures and graphics, walked me through the story. I say me, because no one else came. Nothing is compulsory after all; you have to want what you get. It was a Zoom event, and there were people in a classroom somewhere in another city, but in my community I was alone, scribbling furiously, remembering being a kid with a newspaper, sitting on the front steps when Russia announced the intention to invade the Balkans and take back territory occupied by the Nazis, sucking the Allied Forces of Europe into participation, then stopping at the border to watch them spend all they had in the effort, making it easy for Russia to move in afterwards and take the area for themselves. That’s what those maps had been trying to show me! That’s how Russia wound up in Berlin, building a wall! This was all in a one-hour lesson, planned and presented especially for elderly people, a review of a highly significant part of the history we lived through.

I admit that when it was over I was jealous of those people in the other community who had one another to talk with about it.  I still had questions.

In that same week I saw on film a stunning performance of The Swan Lake by the Australian Ballet. I had seen this ballet many years before without understanding the plot.  Now, a few friends and I had a whole two hours of that wonderful music and a story told without words by actor-dancers doing the impossible with elegance! I confess I wiped tears.

It also happened one day that week that I sat here at this computer, while someone coached me through the phone, sharing a couple of technical things that I had been needing for a long time.  The important thing about that is that when I tried the next day, I could almost do those two things, so I asked Google, understood the answer because of yesterday’s lesson and did what I needed to do. What a relief! I am not good at this sort of thing, and may have to learn again, but at least I think I can.

Meanwhile, my scribbles about history got cold, and I couldn’t read them very well. I wondered if I could get permission to hear the whole lecture again, then remembered with dismay that it was not a film, just a Zoom call. But, would you believe this? The administration added to our library a book on the subject of reorganizing Europe after World War II. Then our activity director got in touch with the history teacher, and he said he would be glad to do a one-on-one with me! That’s when I acted like an excited three-year-old.

That’s when I resolved to advise you: before you decide where to go, whether you want independent living or need assisted care, be sure to ask what kinds of programs they have to make sure you go on learning.

And happy about how smart I was, I walked in the hall, half a mile according to the app on my phone, and when I came into my apartment I was facing east and through the blinds saw the spectacular orange full moon, the “flower supermoon,” my news sources told me, created by a total eclipse (far from here) coinciding with the unusual closeness of the moon to earth. Even here on the edge of the real event, it was magical, reminding me of my ignorance of the astonishing universe we live in.