Bursts of life

In old age, as our energy and strength wane, our world naturally begins to narrow. Now, with the pandemic, that process has been speeding up. But though our outer world may shrink, our inner world can still grow, as I’ve lately been discovering.

This past summer, the Lincoln Centre Summer Jazz Academy went virtual and free. I sat mesmerized through six sessions while Wynton Marsalis taught us multiple ways of listening to music. Using recordings of jazz and other music, across time and around the world, and sharing his own deep knowledge, he showed us how to listen to the rhythm, the creativity of a virtuoso, what’s going on under the melody and so much more. Now I listen to music differently; I have more tools. I am even learning to appreciate music I never used to like.

China has been in the news a lot lately, and I couldn’t understand most of it; I don’t have any background. So I signed up for an online course on China and the US through the Ryerson Life Institute. Olivier Courteaux, articulate and passionate, vividly creates the context and sets the stage for the attitudes and motives that are still in play today in both countries. We have to look back to China’s decline in the 19th century after a millennium of stable central rule, and its subsequent exploitation and humiliation by western imperialism. We also have to look back to the policies of American exceptionalism and America First, beginning in the early 20th century. Now these two countries, with very different political and cultural values, are vying for dominance. How can we use their complex history to understand what is happening today?

I haven’t been a fan of fantasy fiction. I guess I thought of it as a niche genre, full of dystopian visions and violence and stereotyped characters, sort of like comics for teenage boys. So I’d never read anything by Ursula Le Guin. But then a few months ago I came upon a collection of her essays, the Wave in the Mind. With deep, probing intelligence, eloquence and wit, she explores the relationship between reader and writer, prose and poetry, and the nature of speculative fiction. For her, this genre is a way of getting readers to shed their cultural assumptions and examine political, philosophical and social ideas with fresh eyes. Now I realize what I’ve been missing. Luckily, Ursula Le Guin was a prolific writer. I’ll be reading her novels and exploring her alternative visions of society for a long time to come.

What’s so exciting about these experiences is that they all help to build frameworks or schemas: new ways of puzzling out the world and fitting the pieces together. Schemas are powerful because they influence what we pay attention to, affect how quickly we think and learn, and change how we interpret new information. Our world gets bigger. Psychologists tell us that challenging our brain in this way can help stave off dementia, so it’s worth getting out of our comfort zone and stretching ourselves on that account alone. But the main reason why I like to seek out this kind of learning is simply that it’s exhilarating. You’re growing, you’re changing, you’re fully alive, even in old age. There’s nothing like it.