On Turning Seventy-Seven
The Joys and Challenges of the Age
Well, it happened some days ago. I was going to write about it at the time but just had too many lovely gatherings around the celebration and the beginning of September concerts, gatherings and lectures. In fact, today have a UN affiliated interfaith organization computer meeting followed by a whole afternoon on the Middle East and Asia at Southern Methodist University. Oh, yes, had a three-mile run in the morning after feeling good that I could stand on one foot with the other one raised, knee bent, for over ten seconds. That is supposed to be good for balance, something lots of ‘us’ older people don’t have.
You’ve guessed it. I am a rather active ‘elder’ and that is my little personal life, including the bubbles that I inhabit. However, I am also not immune from what is happening outside of those bubbles, outside of my particular communities in the city I live in, the state, the country and the world at large.
After all, my life has included being born to refugees right after WWII, losing a father (Ukrainian) to political convictions, getting a ‘papa’ who was half-Russian and half-Ukrainian and raised me to believe I could do anything a man could do but loved to see me in beautiful, feminine clothes, coming to the US as an immigrant, learning what it meant to be on the wrong side of the tracks, getting into a great college (Mount Holyoke) in spite of the high school advisor’s admonition that I would be lucky as the daughter of blue collar immigrants to get into a state school, worming myself into the United Nations after a master’s degree in international relations, leaving my position as interpreter there to go the Fletcher School so that I could do what I considered to be something substantive, winding up working with the co-founder of the United Nations Development Program and going to incredible missions in Cambodia, South Africa and Mozambique, switching to a UN related not-for-profit which was putting together with Israelis and Palestinians a common international gathering in Jericho (something which dissipated after Rabin’s assassination), before landing as the president of Thanks-Giving Square, another non-governmental organization with UN, and now, retired from that, still a representative of that organization to the UN Civil Society Unit. Forgot to mention that, turning seventy-two, I started publishing the novels I had written all my life. Seven out, six of those centered on the world. Of course, I am working on three others.
That was a long read, if you got through it!!!
But what is important for me and what keeps me going is that I feel in the marrow of my bones and know from past and present information that we humans are traversing a more than challenging phase. I also see that too many of us stay within comfortable bubbles if we are lucky enough to be in them and believe that we cannot do anything to meet and overcome the trials that we, as a species, face.
As the president of Thanks-Giving Square I used to love to say, ‘the local is the global and the global is the local’. Our present communications systems, the transportation disruptions during the Covid pandemic (whatever your thoughts about the ‘pandemic’) that led to empty store shelves, the very air we breathe, all point to the various layers of truth in those words. After all, the progress we have made, from longer lifespans, to skyscrapers, to vehicles, to the number of people on the planet, that has some negative impacts. However little each one of us can help minimize them. Turning up our thermostats in the heat of our present summers (whatever your conclusions about the reasons for heat waves), calculating how and when we drive to minimize our use of vehicles, working voluntarily to clean up a park, setting up a scholarship for those who cannot afford certain educational opportunities, those and countless other efforts, from the tiniest to the biggest, can help us overcome difficulties that would become so great that they lead to conflicts, including some that involve the use of force. Look deeply into our increasing conflicts and see some of the unexpected factors behind them.
Consider that everything is taking place is doing so against a world that has changed more in the last hundred years than it had changed in the previous thousand years, going from under two billion people in nineteen twenty four to over eight billion at the present time, from around five hundred million vehicles about fifty years ago to over two billion vehicles now, from cities where buildings over five stories were a still unusual to ones where skyscrapers rise almost everywhere, from average world life expectancy of around forty years to one of over seventy and where in some places there are articles on individuals reaching up to even a hundred-fifteen years.
We have advanced but we face great challenges. It would be good for us, humans as a whole, to move forward not only with the knowledge of what lies behind us but with the promise of what we, if we put our minds, our hearts, and our hands together, can achieve that will make life better for all of us on this little planet that is our home.
After all, a hundred, even fifty years ago, how many people would have thought that a rather average person, a woman, would be running at seventy-seven? I certainly remember my mother at that age, and she was different because she purposely walked a couple of blocks to get a paper. Now, I have to get ready for the online meeting and then, take the car for the half day learning session. No, I cannot run to that — it is about six miles away. That made me remember something important! Thank you, Leonora Petty, friend from Mount Holyoke, for making me start on that path. Will always remember how I hesitated. Last year at our sixtieth anniversary reunion at the college I not only ran around Upper Lake but found it a rather short run. Had to go further!!!
