Fairy Tale Wisdom: Stories for the Second Half of Life

Part One

Once Upon a Time

Chapter 1

The Inner Adventure of Later Life: An Introduction

Once upon a time, there were three septuagenarians who had so many interests in common and enjoyed each other’s company so much that they decided they ought to write a book together. Not a textbook-y kind of book, like two of them (both gerontologists) had written too many of already, but a more personal kind of book. But not an autobiographical kind of book either, or at least not in a conventional sense, yet a book about themselves all the same, about their stories and about how those stories have changed over time—though in some ways have remained the same. So the three of them began chatting and chatting, and then chatted some more, occasionally in person but mostly through Skype, until, eventually, the book—this book, our book—came into being.

Our aim in it is to shed some much-needed light on the positive potential that’s unique to later life, potential that, sadly, gets eclipsed by what seems society’s preoccupation with aging’s negative dimensions. Our aim, in other words, is to look at aging, despite the aches and pains, troubles and losses, that it can surely bring—in some ways, because of these—as, at heart, not an unmitigated tragedy but an intriguing adventure, a way to the light, you might say, and not to the darkness alone.

Aging can be an adventure on several fronts of course as, for instance, we take up a new hobby in retirement, or a new cause; as we take a long-dreamed-of trip, or revive long-buried talents and embark on exciting creative endeavors. It can be an adventure in an interpersonal sense as we deepen existing relationships and forge fresh ones as well—with grandchildren, for example, or with friends we make in our travels but, earlier in life, would never have met. It is an adventure, overall, as we widen our horizons in directions closed off to us amid the hustle and bustle of our midlife years: raising a family, pursuing a career, and keeping the wolf from the door. Above all else, aging is an adventure inward. It is an adventure into our souls, a journey into the wisdom that has accumulated quietly within us across the years; an exploration into the mysteries and ironies of our lives, the quirks and contradictions that run through our nature and behavior, the open-ended issues or recurring themes and the slow, persistent questions that time and circumstance have seeded deep inside us.

We invite you to come with us on this adventure—this autobiographical adventure—as we revisit an assortment of fairy tales and fables, as well as parables and stories from the Bible, plus other little narratives that we first heard or read so long ago but that lodged themselves within our memories and have haunted us ever since. As we’ve learned with a blend of delight and discomfort, such stories can open up portals into our lives as aging individuals, and indeed into aging in general, through which we can make out patterns and possibilities that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, and can come up against questions that might have gone unasked. Each such question invites us on a quest, toward a broader, more nuanced self-understanding, as we probe ever deeper the intricate inner landscape that awaits us in the final chapters of our lives.

Given that the stories we’re looking into are ones we’ve known for several years, it’s been a fascinating, frequently surprising, experience to return to them in later life. While the origins of some of them—the tales of the Brothers Grimm, for instance, or the fables of Aesop, or stories from the Bible—are comparatively clear, and their versions quite consistent across the years, others have been handed down in collections of folklore that, over the centuries, have migrated from one culture to another, which means that they’ve admitted to a variety, not just of translations, but of tellings, too. What is more, we sometimes discovered elements within them that were decidedly different from our earlier recollections of them. Sometimes those recollections involved only a snippet of what was in fact a much longer story. Other times, details that we’d totally forgotten turned out to enrich immensely the meanings that the story can hold for us today. And, tomorrow, when we’re eighty or ninety, what we get out of them could be a different story entirely! From each of these old tales, new meanings can always be gleaned. As such, there is no limit to how much they can assist us in truly growing old—not just getting old, for that’s going to happen anyway, but consciously, intentionally growing old.

Overall, though, this book is not a scholarly endeavor, even if two of us (Andy and Bill) have been professors by trade and thus, here and there, cite the odd outside source. But it’s far from being from an academic exegesis of arcane texts. Instead, it is a deeply personal, open-minded exploration of aspects of stories that, for whatever reasons, we’ve found meaningful for ourselves, and that hopefully you’ll find meaningful as well. It is a respectful celebration of the gifts these little stories can still give us as we navigate the swirling, churning inner currents of the second half of life.

Occasionally, we found tales that spoke to all three of us, such as The Tortoise and the Hare, which we’ll be looking at next chapter—even though each of us was working with a different version and, what is more, read it in rather different ways! But we also found stories that were, in fact, quite unfamiliar to one, or even two, of us. And just as the stories that spoke to us differed among us, so, too, have we taken different approaches and adopted different styles in responding to them. Which stands to reason, for we’ve inevitably interpreted them in terms of our own histories and personalities.

While, overall, our styles are more visceral, more live and unplugged, than in the writing that each of us has done in the past, Bill’s clearly leans toward the autobiographical. A former minister turned gerontologist, with a keen interest in the narrative complexity of later life (something he calls narrative gerontology), his voice is at once impish and bookish. Before retiring, Barbara was an Episcopal priest, and for twenty-five years before that, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York, a profession in which she asked a lot, a lot, of questions: How did that feel? Why do you think that? What might that mean? So her style, much more than Andy’s or Bill’s, tends toward the pastoral, the piercing, and the inquiring. As for Andy, Barbara’s husband and, similar to Bill, a retired gerontologist, with a strong interest in the history of aging, as well as its spiritual dimensions, his style is witty, ironic, and wry. But whereas he and Bill are both inclined to turn inward and explore the terrain of their own life stories, Barbara reaches outward in a questioning, open-ended contemplation of the countless implications that a given tale can have for how all of us might think about our lives.

It’s not just the style of our reflections that varies, however. It’s our focus as well: what we each zero in on in the stories that we look into, whether it be their characters or plots, or certain images or themes, or how the stories as a whole have spurred us to re-interpret—to re-member—aspects of the stories of our own lives in a highly individual manner, thereby expanding the horizon of our self-understanding. It’s our hope that the interplay among the three of us may lead to a comparable expansiveness in you. And play is the operative term, of course, for the chemistry we’ve enjoyed while working on this book, discussing our respective contributions, critiquing various drafts, has been nothing short of delightful, an adventure in friendship at its best. It’s as if we’ve fed off of one another’s thoughts and feelings amid our weekly meetings. As a result, each of us has grown inwardly in unforeseen ways.

These differences in style and focus have guided how we’ve sequenced the stories themselves, the ones that form the backbone of the book, in Part II. In other words, we’ve intentionally arranged them so that we go (as you might wish to, too, in reading them, though you certainly don’t have to) from one by Barbara to one by Andy to one by Bill, being mindful in the process of varying the sources, and thus cultures, from which the stories hail—Grimm, Andersen, Aesop, the Bible, and the like. Arranging them according to theme, however—whether, say, love or hope, conflict or courage—proved impossible to do, as logical and sensible as that sort of system might seem. For we quickly found out that, once you look closely into it and ponder what it’s in fact about, each story is about several such themes at once, all of them—as with any great tale—hopelessly intertwined.

To give you a feel for how the three of us, and you yourselves, can draw quite different things from any given story, we’ve dedicated Chapter 2 to showing how each of us approached Aesop’s famous fable, The Tortoise and The Hare. Later in the book, in Chapter 19, we offer a few further reflections on what we call the parabolic power that stories of every sort (life stories, too) potentially possess, while in Chapter 20 we provide practical strategies that you can use, and questions you can ask, in connecting stories to your own lives and thus finding new meanings in old tales. In between, from Chapters 3 through 18, or Part II, we tackle five or six tales apiece that, for reasons which will likely always be obscure, have stuck with us throughout our lives. Our hope is that our musings on them will trigger similar musings for you, or more likely, quite other musings besides. It matters not. In fact, they may trigger recollections of totally different stories altogether, stories which, like these little ones have done with us, have taken up residence in the secret corners of your heart. We invite you, then, to join us on this meandering adventure into the wonderland world which each such tale can be, in search of the treasure trove of wisdom that lies buried within it.

Chapter 2

The Tortoise and the Hare

BARBARA’S VERSION

The Hare was once boasting of her speed before the other animals. I have never yet been beaten, said she, when I put forth my full speed. I challenge any one here to race with me.

The Tortoise said quietly, I accept your challenge. That is a good joke, said the Hare; I could dance round you all the way. Keep your boasting till you’ve won, answered the Tortoise. Shall we race?

So a course was fixed and a start was made. The Hare darted almost out of sight at once, but soon stopped and, to show her contempt for the Tortoise, lay down to have a nap. The Tortoise plodded on and plodded on, and when the Hare awoke from her nap, she saw the Tortoise just near the winning-post and could not run up in time to save the race.

Then the Tortoise said: Slow but steady progress wins the race.

Ihad always assumed that the point of Aesop’s fables was the moral precept. Stories were appended, I thought, to make the axioms more easily recalled. But as I look at the story of the tortoise and the hare, it does not really seem to illustrate the importance of slowness and steadiness. It seems, in part, rather to point to the value of commitment and the importance of perseverance. Had Aesop wanted to illustrate the wisdom of approaching life (or its various component challenges) in a slow and steady way, he might better have told the story in a manner that did not focus on the hare’s inattention to the goal, contempt for others, and general lassitude. In this story, it is the hare’s essential refusal to race which determines the outcome, not the slowness and steadiness of the tortoise. One could imagine a story in which the hare strives with such overexertion that she collapses in exhaustion before reaching the goal; or in which she is so taken with the various styles of running that she gets caught up in fancy footwork and loses her way. Either of those approaches might make the point about the advantages of the tortoise’s slowness and steadiness much more clearly. They would assert that it is the tortoise’s virtues that win the race, rather than the hare’s shortcomings.

Regardless of the fit between story and precept, however, perhaps we could look at the precept itself: Slow and steady wins the race. On first reading (or remembering), this seems fairly straightforward. If we wonder at all, it may be at the fact that ancient Greeks had the same admiration for dogged perseverance that we do. We read it as exhorting us to plod along (some translations actually render the adage Plodding wins the race), doing the right thing, in the knowledge that we will be victorious in the end.

A few moments’ thought, though, begins to be troubling. Is this motto true? What, in our culture, or to each of us, would winning the race entail? Might it be something akin to success? If so, are the most successful people you know (the winners of the world) plodders? If we see success in terms of money, fame, social status, or other quantifiable rankings, plodders do not seem to win the race. Standardized exams are timed. We are advised to snatch the moment lest the right time pass us by. Our culture certainly does not seem to prize steady, humble, protracted movement.

And what of the metaphor as a whole? Is life to be seen as a competition? As something we should try to win? It is certainly a widely-held approach. Sports metaphors abound and, in our highly capitalistic society, competition is a central reality—for social service agencies applying for relatively scarce charitable funds, as well as for corporations seeking to maximize shareholder returns. Certainly many of us have needed to hone our competitive gifts in order to make a living.

On the other hand, as we age, competition often seems to lose whatever luster it once had, if for no other reason than we are frequently bested by our younger competitors. We are over the hill. We haven’t become proficient in the new technologies used in our professional lives. Or, even if we’ve kept up, the Young Turks are chomping at the bit, ready to take over the game. Ageism is rampant throughout most professions and industries, and even when we’re confident that we haven’t lost a step, our younger coworkers often seem eager to have us move on, even as they might praise us for what we have (had) to offer. This situation, of course, is all the more evident once we have actually retired. We might ask at any age—but may be required to ask as we get older—is a competitive, zero-sum view of the meaning of life useful to us?

Perhaps we might set aside the moral precept of Aesop’s story and look primarily at the tale itself, without needing to find there a moral dictum. As it turns out, we have support for this approach. A number of scholars have suggested that Aesop’s morals were later appended to the tales, and that Aesop hadn’t actually written them at all, rather leaving the stories to speak for themselves. Although the tales were, especially after the advent of the printing press, frequently used in children’s education, many believe that in the early days (after Aesop’s life in the sixth or fifth century BCE) the fables were told to adults, and dealt with religious, social, and political themes. So they may well not have been initially focused on moral precepts, but on the pithy depiction of timeless human traits—without the added moral component.

Before the race begins, let’s look for a moment at the onlookers. Who would be interested in watching such a lopsided contest? Are there some friends of Tortoise, maybe, who have told her there is no need to race? Who have reminded her of her many other gifts? Maybe some stay around for the race wanting to be there to console her after her loss. Maybe there are some who haven’t thought about the disparity of gifts for the race, but just love to see the hare run—such a beautiful sight, with every muscle working as it should, propelling the animal in a graceful, lovely, moving picture. Are there, on the other hand, friends of Hare who are delighted with the idea of humiliating Tortoise? Unless they have prior reason to dislike her, might we imagine that such mean-spiritedness could reveal the painful insecurity of these viewers? Maybe there are some who want to bet on the race—focused not on the outcome itself, but on the margin of the win. For these, presumably, the race is not so much about their friends as about the excitement of betting itself and figuring out the odds. Tortoise and Hare have stopped being actual acquaintances, for these bettors, and become just a means to the excitement of the wager. It’s interesting, perhaps, to think how easy it is to shift from thinking about real people—politicians, bosses, acquaintances, even close friends and family—and find ourselves viewing them as means to an end, focused primarily—or solely—on how their actions affect us. For the imagined bettors in this story, Tortoise and Hare are simply objects whose behavior will result in either the pain of material loss or the pleasure of its gain.

So we are ready for the race. First, Hare: she loses as a result of staggering hubris or an inability to maintain an enthusiastic sense of purpose. There are periodic stories of life’s winners—stars whose names are familiar to the general public because of their success in some field—being brought down by revelations of personal or professional activities unsavory or illegal enough to deprive them of public adulation—or, in some cases, even employment altogether. In some ways, they might be compared to Hare in our fable, who treats the race (which she herself suggested) with arrogance and contempt for others, and despite her greater gifts, loses to the plodder. Cheers from the bystanders are heard throughout the media circus that ensues. The plodders can feel justified, and redeemed for their erstwhile failures, which are now seen as evidence of moral rectitude and true success. Perhaps this is our first emotional response to this story: schadenfreude, as we see the high and mighty fallen.

But such a current events analogy actually distorts the fable, whose quick-footed loser might be more complex than a simple narcissist who disdains the rules and finally gets caught. Our Hare plays by the rules, and wins almost all of her races because of her greater gifts. Her loss here is not due to moral turpitude but to loss of interest in the race. She has raced, very well, for long enough that others know that she’s fast. She’s