Reflections on Turning 75

This weekend is my 75th birthday. Three quarters of a century of living.

In a sense, it’s a non-event, an arbitrary mark on the calendar. But I felt I owed it to myself to stop and reflect on it a bit — what it feels like to have had this much life, to be at this age, and what a gift it has all been.

“As Time Goes By…”

For many years, I’ve been more or less unaware of the personal passage of time… that, at a certain point, there started to be more years behind me to remember and fewer years ahead to anticipate, more experiences in my past and, presumably, fewer likely in my future.

I haven’t even been particularly aware of my own mortality. It’s not something that seriously preoccupies me, even at this ‘venerable’ age I seem to have reached.

Occasionally, I’m brought up short by reality.

The reality that right now, as I write, a dear next-door neighbor my age is dying. That the Oberlin College Class of 1965 50th Reunion Directory, that arrived for me four years ago, had a rather long list of ‘In Memoriam’ members. That most of my favorite graduate school professors at the University of Chicago, and some of my long-ago academic colleagues at the University of California, are gone. That many people I have known over the decades and across several continents — including Raphael, my beloved husband— are coping with the challenges of serious illness.

Another poignant reminder of the fleetingness of life has been the passing away since the start of the new century 19 years ago of so many great thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, scholars, scientists and and public figures who shaped my mind and inspired my heart and imagination.

Isaac Stern…Katherine Graham…Kalpana Chawla…Shirley Chisholm…Ann Richards…Luciano Pavarotti…Jean-Marie Lustiger…Paul Scofield…Alexandr Solzhenitsyn…Odetta…Ali Akbar Khan…Christopher Hitchens…Neil Armstrong…Nelson Mandela…Robin Williams…Pete Seeger…Rosa Parks…Leonard Cohen…Elie Wiesel…Harper Lee…Dmitri Hvorostovsky…Dick Gregory…Steven Hawking…Aretha Franklin…

But, in general, I go on living my days as I always have — through all the ups and downs of an eventful life that has had its fair share of triumphs and defeats, opportunities and setbacks, hopes and disappointments, moments of fulfillment and moments of great loss.

The Constants of Character

Whether I’ve been up or down, supported or alone, at ease or under stress, tracking with my vision and goals or flailing about in confusion, there have always been some constants in my life:

Fulfilling my commitments to those around me and trying to be thoughtful towards others… Seeing what needs to be done and doing it… Fixing what’s broken, solving problems… Going about whatever work I’m doing with total intensity and focus… Trying to be a a good neighbor and good citizen of my locality, my nation and the world…

Dreaming and planning for things I want to accomplish or experience in the future… Engaging in depth with what interests me and attracts my curiosity… Being happy, enjoying laughter, sharing moments of joy with others. Singing. Writing. Thinking. Learning… Connecting with people of all ages and stations in life, reaching out to people I don’t know, making new friends…

Reveling in the pleasure of physical movement, the out-of-doors and the joys of simple healthful living… Loving all that is civilized, uplifting, thoughtful, meaningful and just…

Being quick to appreciate and forgive, slow to anger and resentment… Laughing at myself rather than taking myself and my personal travails too seriously… Recovering from setbacks and rejections, changing directions when confronted with obstacles, taking charge of my own success… A basically optimistic and cooperative attitude toward life…

And, last but not least, a romantic who never gave up on the dream of true love…

That’s how my remarkable internationalist, social activist parents raised me and my three younger siblings.

These values came from many sources in their own lives, including having been children of the Great Depression, having been part of the great World War II generation (as pacifists), outsiders of sorts in their own many worlds, elevated beyond their humble roots by the magic of education.

But above all, it was their sane, exemplary, generous, open-minded, undogmatic, unsentimental and thoroughly this-worldly approach to what it meant to them to be Christians and responsible human beings. It was all about service to others, love in action, fighting for justice, building community, making the world a better place. Never once, in my growing up, did I ever hear anything about biblical literalism, theological dogma, prayer for fulfillment of personal desires, denial of science, heaven and hell, eternal damnation of unbelievers, the evil of other religions or races, and all the other hateful garbage that gets promulgated in the name of so much of religion these days.

So, for all these foundational gifts to my life, thank you, Howard and Elsie Schomer.

The Lottery of Life

The more time goes by, the more I realize what extraordinary experiences I have had in my 75 years. And how so much in my life that has been nourishing and important has been a matter of luck — the luck of circumstances, background, connections, serendipity — as well as the character constants that made it possible to respond positively to what came my way.

Multiple Cultures, Multiple Places

As a child, I grew up in the historic French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, (famous for its heroic actions in World War II rescuing Jewish refugees, especially children), then in another village, outside Geneva, Switzerland, at a time when many of the great post-war international institutions were being forged there by other idealists like my parents. These European roots of mine run deep.

As a teenager, I made the transition to the brave new world of the United States (Chicago), which I experienced culturally with the fresh eyes and insecurity of a quasi-immigrant, and had to learn to navigate by trial and error, even though I was by birth an American. This was far from easy; it took me years to feel truly at home, and not some kind of interloper. But I did eventually find my way into American culture and made it mine.

At age 21, fresh out of Oberlin College, I went to India on a three-year assignment teaching French in an inner-city high school in Mumbai, thereby starting my lifelong involvement and love affair with India (especially its languages, music, history and ethnography), and so India rapidly became my third culture.

Supported by this early immersion in three great cultures, I have found that no country or civilization can ever seem alien to me, and that being a global citizen of this incredibly diverse world of ours is the only way I can conceive of myself.

Education, More Education, and Then More Education

I started with the rigorous French and Swiss primary and secondary educational systems, with their relentless emphasis on rationality, clarity, discipline, excellent verbal expression, knowing history, understanding philosophy, and intolerance of sloppy thinking or performance. Latin and other foreign languages such as German were included, as well as detailed physical and political geography, the names and reigns of kings (France) and the history of cantons (Switzerland), going way back to the beginning of national identities. Essays, not multiple choice, were how you demonstrated your knowledge.

At Oberlin College, I benefited from an absolutely classical American liberal arts education. With a remarkable group of dedicated professors, I studied with equal gusto subjects as varied as American Government, Principles of Sociology, English Literature, Russian Language, Inernational Politics, Asian Civilizations, Foundations of Western Thought, World Religions, and Music Appreciation. I graduated with a major in European History. Not a single practical how-to ‘skills course’ in my whole undergraduate portfolio. Now that was a real education! It equipped me with the foundation to become and do anything I wanted to. I’m forever grateful.

Finally, upon my return from India, I embarked on a PhD in South Asian Languages & Civilization from the University of Chicago. Six years of immensely satisfying study, so focused and all-engrossing that I often did not pay much attention to what else was going on in the world. Nothing pleased me more in those years than being down in the stacks of the library, for hours on end, poring through old books, or staying up late at night working on research papers on abstruse subjects that most people would be unlikely to understand or care about. The life of a scholar! Loved it! The research in India and then writing of my dissertation, which was a truly formidable and difficult undertaking, was something that I felt immensely privileged to do, and would not have traded for anything in the world.

All this learning has been a gift that never stops giving. It has not only given me employment opportunities, and the ability re-invent myself again and again as career paths became blocked to me for one reason or another. Even more importantly, it has given me a mental enrichment and broad perspective on life upon which I draw daily.

What strikes me in all this is how fortunate I was, and how supported by a system that, in those days, did not necessitate taking on lifelong debt in order to get what should be available to all people — a chance at education.

‘Maximal Marriage’— The Greatest Prize of All

I just encountered the term ‘maximal marriage’ in the new book recently published by by David Brooks titled The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. In this wise and inspiring work, he calls on our modern American society to get beyond its hyper-individualism and focus on the siren of personal success to what really counts in life: commitment, community and connection.

In his chapter on marriage, I recognized immediately the crucial life lesson at stake. “Who you marry is the most important decision you will ever make. Marriage colors your life and everything else in it.”

And in a ‘maximal marriage’, there is no limit to commitment and intimacy, and hence to the degree of openness, vulnerability and willingness to endure hardships on each other’s behalf. And to the need to be truly aligned on fundamentals, values, interests, and goals in life.

This prize had eluded me for much of my adult life. I was married twice, to men I loved then, and who were nothing if not good, decent, interesting and worthwhile human beings. But that ‘maximal’ element was not there, and we drifted apart on our individual life quests. It was hard. Later relationships were likewise unsatisfactory.

Just as I was about to give up on the whole idea, Raphael entered my life — all of a sudden, a piece of totally unlikely serendipity. He was international too (family background in Latvia-Lithuania, upbringing in South Africa, immigrant to the U.S. in the 1960s), steeped in classical learning, a strong sense of European civilization, and experience of the academic world as well as other professional worlds. And, like me, he was at the end of his ropes after two failed marriages and some troubling post-marriage relationships.

This is not the place to tell the whole miraculous story. But the reality is that this mid-life marriage, now going on 30 years, has been one of the greatest gifts in my life.

And so, as I turn 75, I reflect on the sheer luck I have had with the lottery of life

The Portrait: Capturing What 75 Feels Like to Me

Raphael asked me what I would like for my birthday. Without a moment’s hesitation, I said:

“I would like you to do a portrait of me that expresses how I feel at age 75. It needs to show energy, dynamism, movement, suppleness, a sense of direction, joy, looking to the future. It can’t be of me sitting quietly on a comfortable chair, looking pensive or with a soft smile… that’s not me. It can’t just focus on my face…. it has to emphasize my arms and my legs, in motion, and my torso, because that’s where I feel my life force and my personal identity. It should be a picture not about how people see me, but about how I feel myself.”

This was not the first time he had photographed me. It’s been going on ever since we first met, and every time it’s been the creation of something remarkable and unconventional. He’s a photographer and digital artist whose images are never merely representational, but always dense with layers of ideas and story. (Check him out at Raphael Shevelev — Ideas in Photography and especially his portraits.

I put on black leggings to anchor the image in a feeling of strength and solidity, and a wildly colorful shape-contouring long-sleeved top to allow long arms to form a dramatic design element. I had my hair pulled back but flowing across the left shoulder to show both seriousness and playfulness.

The stance Raphael asked me to take suggested a strong yoga posture, with a sweeping motion from an emphatic don’t-mess-with-me right elbow at the waist to a left arm reaching upward at a diagonal to an infinity of time and space and possibility.

After trying several facial positions and expressions, we settled on a forward-facing, forthright look that combined both intensity and a friendly smile. This was not hard to do, as all I had to do was to look at Raphael and imagine us in one of our usual animated conversations combining intellectual ferocity and just plain fun.

We worked on the portrait shoot all morning, one more artist-model collaboration, doing it over and over again until we got it just right. He then labored the rest of the day refining the image, and positioning it on a background made from one of his abstracts derived from botanicals , which added even more to the sense of life force, energy and motion.

“That’s it,” I said, “you’ve done it! This is exactly how I feel as I turn 75! Many thanks for this gift, and for 32 years of life together.”

What’s Wrong with Feeling Great at 75?

Is this sense of joy and life and future captured in the portrait simply the blindness and arrogance of a person who has reached age 75 in great health, without the soul-wearying burden of chronic illness or a debilitating accident, happily married, professionally fulfilled, and embedded in a community of like-minded and mutually supportive friends?

Does it come from a privileged life that hasn’t known the grind of real poverty and deprivation (as opposed to occasional financial stress) or the devastating traumas of personal and social violence and war that so many individuals and groups have endured? Is it some random bit of personal temperamental luck, whereby the inevitable life experiences of pain and loss and rejection have always been eventually overcome, leaving few traces of distress and negativity?

Or is what I’m experiencing as I turn 75 more common than what our cultural mythology about what being ‘old’ or ‘older’ would lead us to expect?

I thought I would look into this a bit.

Appreciating Life

An article by clinical psychologist Mary Pipher that has been circulating since it was first written in January 2019 is titled The Joy of Being a Woman in her Seventies.

I could not identify with any of the toxic stereotypes towards ‘older women’ that she ascribed to our culture — devalued, denigrated, rendered invisible, on the margins, and so on. I’ve simply not experienced this personally, even though I know it exists, and find it infuriatingly stupid and pathetic on the part of those who hold these views.

But I did resonate with a number of important points Pipher made about that joy of being a woman in your seventies. (And, by the way, I am quite sure that many ‘older’ men have that joy too… let’s not turn into female chauvinist piglets here!)

• We’ve had “decades to develop resilience”.
• We’ve learned that “happiness is a skill and a choice.”
• We’ve learned “how to make everything workable.”
• We know “the importance or reasonable expectations.”
• We’ve learned “how to look every day for humor, love and beauty.”
• We are “less angst-filled and more content.”

And, above all, that “having had more tragedy and more bliss in our lives than we could have foreseen. . . we realize that. . . it has been a miracle and a privilege to be alive.”

Yes, this is definitely how I feel at 75. Filled with gratitude for life.

Acquiring Wisdom

The other day, I got into a conversation with someone I know on the subject of brain plasticity, age and wisdom.

“I’m fascinated by brain science,” he said. “There’s a revolution going on in how we understand the brains of people as they age. The brain is more plastic among younger people in some ways, but there are other ways in which older brains have a plasticity that is not there among the young.”

I jumped at this idea.

One gets weary of Googling ‘brain’ and ‘age’ and being inundated with articles and research that seem to imply that it’s an inevitable descent from the high point of your infancy (when you’ve got a huge cerebral cortex and vast numbers of synapses), through your youth (when you have great neural flexibility to learn new things and think in new ways), to adulthood (when you’re sort of on autopilot), to old age (when everything slows down, and your brain just can’t function the way it used to).

In a 2012 special report to CNN titled The Aging Brain: Why getting Older Just Might Be Awesome, Amanda Enayati references research that has uncovered many ways in which the brain actually improves with age.

What we learn from this, contrary to the prevalent belief system of our culture, and much of the research that is purely laboratory rather than real-world based, includes the following:

• Innovation, in order to be useful, needs to start from a place of empathy, and empathy is definitely something that grows increasingly with age.
• Older people tend to be better at ‘unpacking’ complexity into insights because of their greater life experience.
• Older people have more dots to connect, and are therefore more likely to have broad perspectives instead of excessively simple linear solutions.
• Older people tend to be better at anticipating problem s and reasoning things out — our complex reasoning skills improve with age.

All this is because there is so much more ‘stuff’ in our brains to draw on. “And that,” said my friend, “is what we call wisdom.”

I loved that definition of wisdom. So much of what is said about wisdom tends to be a bit on the sentimental and, to my mind, overly ‘spiritual’ side of things. But I’ve often wondered at the sense I have had, in recent years, of my brain being so full of so much, and that every new thing I encounter immediately connects with something already there, and that I can see the whole picture of situations so easily.

Now I know: I’ve finally achieved some wisdom!

So I think I’ll go back to not thinking about my age, just being who I am, doing what I do (fulfilling my commitments, being a good neighbor and citizen, engaging in what interests me, learning new things, dreaming and planning, enjoying physical movement, connecting with people, living a ‘maximal marriage’, and being grateful for what the lottery of life has brought me). . . until the next time one of these supposedly landmark birthday occasions rolls in on me again.

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Karine Schomer, PhD is a writer, speaker, scholar, and a political and social commentator. She writes on Medium at https://medium.com@schomer44. In her essays, she explores the worlds of society, politics, culture, history, language, world civilizations and life lessons. You can read her writer’s philosophy in The Idea Factory. In her professional life, she earns her keep as a consultant at www.cmct.net and www.indiapractice.com.