My mom was a person who always seemed young. She had so many interests! Getting her Doctorate in Naturopathy at the age of 62 was an indication of her unending interest in life and helping others! And she did not quit picking up books and learning about the latest techniques in her field until shortly before she died at 83.
One person in the news right now is Dolly Parton. Whatever you may think of her, one thing she did not do is slow down. For her, life was an adventure, and she kept dreaming and creating right until the end.
We had a sermon on Sunday where Father talked about our lives here on earth and how we can never slack off! The devil goes about seeking whom he may devour and we need to stay on top of our game as far as our faith goes.
So let’s think of every day as a new adventure…an adventure of growing in our faith and following the dreams God has placed in our hearts, always seeking His will for our lives.
Father Daniel Lord, 1950’s, suggests that these are the very things that will keep us young, in spite of a body that is slowing down….
Young Souls
Youth, maturity, and old age are not a matter merely or even mostly of the body. They are very much a matter of mind, of soul, of emotions. It is rather interesting to notice what groups have a way of staying very young and very much alive.
High in that list all of us would, I think, place artists of almost all types (except those who wreck their youth with folly or excesses of any kind). Actors and actresses stay young. Scientists have a way of remaining young in ripe old age.
Authors often remain youthful and alert quite beyond their period of productivity; they keep on running, like old Shaw himself or H. G. Wells or Dickens or the long-bearded poets.
And when baseball players are tottering to the dugout for the last time, musicians and painters and philosophers are just starting off to a good healthy swing at the ball of their particular art or craft. T
hen saints have an astounding way of staying young. They remain the youngest of the sons and daughters of our race. Many of them seem actually to have found the fountain of perpetual youth. But we’ll come back to them later.
So I think that the whole fundamental measure of youth comes down to this: How alert is your mind? How responsive is your soul? How quick are your reactions? How many interests have you? Is the world wonderful to you, or is it a bore? Do you find most things delightful or annoying? Are you fond of new acquaintances and devoted to old friends?
While you are on the watch for new marvels, do you keep all your affection for the old astonishing things that have always delighted you?
Young Aged
One meets with gratifying regularity old people who are intensely young. I am thinking at the moment of one old lady who is well into her eighties. Her personality dominates the family circle, and she is by all odds the alivest one in the group.
Nothing escapes her interests. She is alternately amazed and amused and concerned by the happenings in her home circle and in the world.She knows all the baseball scores, and she can tell you the odds on the current heavyweight contender.
She enjoys good music and pores over current literature. She is up to the minute on political questions and has violent opinions on every new issue as it arises. She wants all the news of her family and her family’s families. She has become a sort of clearinghouse for the harmless gossip of the family and of the neighborhood.
She sews, and she hums as she sews. She is equally at home with a needle, a book, a rosary, or a cool convivial drink in her hand. No one ever thinks of her as being old.
Only the heaviness of her body and the slow dimming of her hearing keep her from seeming as young as her granddaughters. And when she meticulously cares for her complexion before she retires, using all the correct creams and cleansers, it seems, not the affected vanity of an old woman, but the perfectly proper conduct for one with so young a personality.
Within Control
No doubt about it youth is aliveness, interest, vivid response. Now note: While it is not always possible to retain the youthfulness of our arteries and the pliability of our muscles, it is possible for even the person of little education to keep his interests alive, to develop new interests constantly, and to be youthful in mind and soul.
I have known old Irishmen who could scarcely read but who had souls and minds that were responsive to everything that went on around them. They were interested in everything that happened, in everyone they met.
How different from the young man who sits dozing in the corner of the porch, cigarette pendant from loose lip, daydreaming or entirely dreamless in the midst of a world that is simply pulsing with excitement and wonder and beauty and the march of events and the dance of the days.
I have known old Germans who woke to beautiful life when they heard good music, even though they themselves could perhaps read not a line of it.
To Stay Young
I have known old teachers who remained as young as the pupils they taught, and younger. It was almost as if the youngsters that came into their classroom left behind them some of their youth to keep their teachers eternally young. Often the teachers were vastly younger than the old, bored, uninterested, incapable-of-being-stimulated young people that passed unresponsively through their hands.
So there is just this simple recipe for remaining young: Stay interested—biologically interested. Yes; staying young is a matter of keeping the mind and soul young. And that consists in keeping one’s interest alive. Plenty of interests, plenty of life. Quick of response, much alive. No interests, already old. No response, already dead.
Two Rules
Now it is essential to remember two things:
First no one can keep another person alive. Each one must do this for himself.
Second it really is not very important what sort of interest one develops. Any interest that has permanence will do. Interest in practically anything will serve to keep a person alert, absorbed, alive.
I should like to stress that first point because I grow weary when I see young people who depend upon others for their interests. It is quite true that when a stimulating adult crosses a youngster’s path, that youngster is most fortunate. Some sparks from the electric generator of the adult’s personality may serve to set the young person afire with interests and enthusiasms.
Thrice blessed is the child of alert parents, parents whose interests are varied and spontaneous yet carefully cultivated. Twice happy the young person who finds himself within the magnetic field of some grown man or woman who has kept at high frequency his or her power of response.
But in the long run the seed of aliveness will be found to be within the individual. It requires self-expansion, self-development.
A mother and a father give their child physical life; they and the doctors and the nurses and the teachers nourish and care for that young life. Eventually they turn that physical life over to the care of the child, who makes it, mars it, develops it, stunts it as he wishes.
And the aliveness of his mind and soul in time becomes his responsibility in exactly the same fashion as his body is his responsibility.
What Interest?
As for the interest that will keep you youthfully alive, why “the world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as [and far more responsive and alert and alive than] kings.”
A painter may be—and many are—a perfect dullard in everything but his painting. But the fact that he is so keenly interested in subjects for fresh canvases and in precisely the technique by which he will imprison the new beauties of those subjects in undying color makes him vividly alive, perpetually young.
A scientist may have for his field of research only one small fraction of the universe, but the exhaustlessness of the fraction keeps him young, alive. He dare not grow old; there is too much to learn in this intriguing field. He will stay young; his mind is too active to permit him to shrivel and mummify.
Doomed to Grow Old
One of the curses of our modern industrialism is just this fact: For eight hours a day (or whatever the number of hours that the union permits) too many millions of men and women work and slave at jobs that from their souls they almost hate. They stand at a punch machine. They put nuts and bolts together. They count bottles. They paste labels. They sit at the wheel of a tractor. They drive the shuttle subway train back and forth between two bleak stations.
And in the grind of a few dull years they grow prematurely old. It would seem that they exist for the sole purpose of doing something that they fiercely dislike. They are not alive when they are working. They die by degrees at the machine that masters and dominates them.
Yet even these men and women could save themselves, could stay alive and remain young if there were something else in their lives that filled their leisure time (each of us has a portion of it these days) with interest.
But only when we have developed education to a point where it concerns itself less with how a man makes money and far, far more with how he lives, less with his job and more with what he does when he is free and at leisure, what joys and hobbies and interests fill his non-working hours, only then will education help to keep men and women young.
Any Interest
What interests should you have? What interests and enthusiasms will keep you young? How could I possibly enumerate them?
There is the absorbing interest of getting something, anything, done . . . anything from building a skyscraper to turning out an excellent enlargement of a pet negative, from building bridges to laying out a tennis court or training a hunting dog, from writing a novel to playing the piano well enough to have a bowing acquaintance with important music, from mastering some important scientific problem—the cure for a disease, the analysis of the atom, the control of weather conditions in a certain farm area—to gathering first editions or triangular stamps or china or matchbox covers.
Man is essentially a creator. He must be doing things, making things. Modern industry has largely deprived him of the opportunity to create. He no longer makes a carriage; he simply stamps the trademark on the hubs of the wheels. He no longer carves a statue; he handles the lever of a machine that presses out on tin ash trays profiles of Krazy Kat.
Creators
Until man recaptures his right to create a thing completely, to fashion the whole of a beautiful or useful object, he will grow old at the workbench and exhausted at the machine. That is why, if one wants to retain one’s youth, it is so tremendously important to select for one’s career a job in which one can accomplish an entire work, whatever that work may be—saving souls or bodies, making music or statuettes.
For creation is the great renewer of the creator’s youth. So parents live again in their children; authors find their life renewed in their books; the great builders of the world have remained young in heart and mind and aspiration and effort until the day they died.
Youth From People
Then there’s the youth-giving interest in people. Mothers experience that in most astonishing ways; if their children give to them even a fairly decent return of love and devotion, mothers often remain remarkably young.
The man who is interested in people has a limitless means of keeping his soul alive. Great lawyers remain young. Great doctors, despite their heavy work and often dangerous exposure to all sorts of peril, keep, as long as they are sincerely interested in the people for whom they are working, youthful hearts and fresh outlooks.
Blessed the man or the woman whose work throws him or her with young people and who thus endlessly renews his or her youth.
There are undoubtedly men and women who keep young by collecting, not stamps and bric-a-brac and menus, but varied associations with their fellow men. And they have in that hobby a youth-reviving and youth-sustaining interest.
Intelligent readers have an aliveness of mind that keeps them young. Collectors, unless they come to be pedantic specialists —out of touch with life itself and valuing the thing for itself and not for its association with human beings—often remain young.
So there are a thousand different ways of keeping that alertness of mind and aliveness of soul that are the basis of youth and the revivifying fountain that perpetuates youthfulness. The listless and the uninterested, the surfeited and the blasé, men and women who lose their enthusiasms because they have too much of life’s goods or too hopelessly little—these are the ones who grow old. There is no real reason why any intelligent person should be numbered among them.
Paradox
But I stated earlier that as a group the saints were delightfully young. That brings to mind one of Christ’s most surprising paradoxes. The world to which Christ spoke was a very old, tired world. Paganism was old, as paganism is always old.
Its gods were dead or dying; its faith was gone; wearily it let slip even its human rights and yielded to tyrants who gave in return for youthful freedom bread and circuses; it had little hope in humanity, slaves most of them, soldiers, prostitutes, the wretchedly poor; it distrusted its philosophers to such an extent that it laughed at the word Sophia (wisdom) and flung at those who professed to teach wisdom the epithet Sophists.
The Jewish world was old. It had waited very, very long for the coming of the Messiah. Its religion had grown stiff and formal, encrusted with all the customs and the traditions of a wearisome past. Its law, growing out of ancient pride, had solidified into a matter of strict forms and meaningless ablutions and fringes; and out of this very rigidity had come a kind of limpness, a despair of humanity.
While a man was not expected to lift a finger on the Sabbath, not even to heal a friend, he could not be asked to remain faithful to his wife.
Christ’s Dear Command
It was an old, weary world, far older and wearier than ever it has been in the centuries since that time. It was to that world that Christ addressed His astonishing paradox.
Taking a child into His arms, He looked up at the grey-bearded Pharisees and the weary-eyed Roman soldiers and said: “Unless you . . . become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
He calmly announced that His followers must not only be young and stay young; they must be actually childlike. No wonder the weary soldiers of Rome and the custom-encrusted scribes and Pharisees turned away from this man who demanded that His followers be born again of water and the Holy Ghost and remain like little children all the days of their life.
A prayer I like to say regularly, “Lord, purify my intentions.” We are so wrapped up in self that oftentimes we think we are wanting and praying for something good, but often, because of our fallen human nature. it is smattered with selfishness. Praying for a purity of intentions is a great prayer to help with this very thing!
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