92 years old, moving about with a walker, diminished in sight and in hearing but still functioning reasonably well, still able to engage in conversation with others, but must confess to the occasions when I’m frustrated and embarrassed by not being able to call up, to retrieve, a needed word.
And I’ve reassessed what I wrote some five and a half years ago, in August 2017, about being a Sannyasi in the Information age, about being in what I consider the fourth stage of life, a final stage preceded by what my husband, Ravi, would have defined as that of Student, then of Householder and a third stage of Retired.
I reinterpreted my Sannyasi stage from the Hindu emphasis on renunciation to that of extended Elder, to a stage of, perhaps, limited mobility but still of social and intellectual engagement, all made possible by modern medical technology that repairs the various failing organs of the body, by the computer and by access through the internet to a universe of good, even great, articles and books, to a magnificent library. For example, in the blog post preceding that on the Sannyasi is an essay that grew out of my reading and thinking about women’s roles in society, beginning as wife and mother in the societal form in which we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, that of the small family-based hunting-gathering band, and then, some 9,000 years or so ago when, because of the agricultural revolution, people settled down to life in a village or an urban community where men’s roles changed in numbers and sorts but those of women not so much — all of this recorded and analyzed by Jared Diamond in his 1997 “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.”
But my current on-line reading has been changed by the AI Revolution, changed by reading articles drawing from an essentially new anthropology, one much changed by new technologies, such as in archaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA in the bones and tissue of an individual buried in an archeological site, and by the AI revolution in collecting and analyzing data, for testing the anthropologists’ hypotheses on the nature of social groups and communities, as in this article using game theory.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701478
I could write about my thinking on the nature of human nature that results from our evolution as hunter-gatherers and what this means for the future – but I won’t.
More immediate are my thoughts and feelings about what I consider to be my post-sannyasi self. Personal experience tells me that a new stage of life is on the horizon, one brought on by new and emerging technology, a stage of many people living into their 90s, one for which the medical care system is ill-prepared. I think and I feel that my doctors and nurses do not, cannot, understand what is happening to my body. After all, any person naturally lacks intuition for what is happening in a body older than one’s own. Given those thoughts but wanting to be examined by and talk with a doctor professionally equipped to care for someone my age, two months ago I asked to be seen by one of the few geriatricians in my large medical care system and was informed that the earliest available appointment would be in the middle of next June. So I carry on with my present aches, pains, physical and mental limitations, not knowing which ones can and should be seen by an M.D. or a nurse practitioner. I suppose that if/when I have a medical crisis I’ll be taken to an E.R. In the meantime, I carry on, moving about, staying active until a pain slows me down, trying to be careful and not fall, waiting for my death, wondering when and how it will happen.
This is enough, at least for now, but maybe permanently.
Iris sans frontières 