As seniors, we have lived through more seasons than we can count. We have seen the world through war and peace, through depression and prosperity. I, like you went through times when the newspaper landed on the porch with news that made my father sigh, and times when it brought stories that made my mother cry with joy. And here I am, still here, still watching, still wondering.
And I must tell you honestly that these past few years have
tested me. The constant churn of negativity, the anger that seems to echo from
every screen, the sense that the world I helped build is somehow crumbling or
worse, was never any good to begin with. It weighs on me. It settles in my
bones like a damp chill.
But here is what eighty years of living has taught me.
Living itself means nothing if we don’t question. Our whole act of being is a
response, a way of being responsible toward life.
Let me say that again because it took me most of these years
to truly understand it. We are not here to simply exist, to eat and sleep and
pass the hours until we are gone. We are here because we ask question and are
asked questions. Every morning the sun rises and asks us, "What will you
do with this day?" Every headline shouts a question at us, "How will
you respond to this?" Every person who crosses our path, whether they are
rude or kind, is asking us, "Who are you going to be in this moment?"
And here is the beautiful, liberating truth. We get to
choose the answer.
When I was a young man, I thought life was about
accumulating. A good job, a nice car, a house with a lawn, a retirement fund.
And those things are fine. They are comfortable. But they are not the answer.
They are just the furniture we arrange while we are figuring out what to say.
The answer, the only answer that has ever mattered, is how
we show up for one another.
I watch the news some days and I want to turn it off. The
world seems so angry, so divided, so certain that everyone on the other side is
the enemy. And I understand why people my age pull back, close the curtains,
and wait for it all to pass. But I have come to believe that is the wrong
response.
If living is about asking and answering questions, then
withdrawing is refusing to answer. And I believe seniors have too much wisdom,
too much experience, too much living behind us to stay silent now.
Do you remember what it was like before all of this? Before
the Internet taught us to fear one another? I remember a time when we knew our
neighbors by name, when we left our doors unlocked, when a stranger on the
street was met with a nod and a hello, not suspicion. That world is not gone.
It is just hiding. And we are the ones who can call it back.
Not through grand gestures. Not through protests or speeches
or social media posts that disappear in an hour. But through the small,
stubborn act of being responsible toward life exactly where we stand.
I have a neighbor, younger fellow, probably 50, works too
hard, always in a hurry. For months he would walk past my house with his head
down, earbuds in, lost in his own world. And one day I decided that his
indifference was a question. "Are you going to let me disappear into my
screen?" it asked. "Or are you going to remind me that I am
human?"
So, I started waving. Just a simple wave from the porch. The
first few times, he didn't even see me. Then he started glancing up, surprised.
Then he started nodding. Then, one day, he took out the earbuds and said,
"Beautiful day, isn't it?"
That is responsibility toward life. That is answering the
question.
We worry so much about the state of the world, about
politics, about the economy, about whether the young people are going to be
okay. And those are real concerns. I am not suggesting we ignore them. But I am
suggesting that we cannot fix them from a distance. We can only fix what is
right in front of us.
The checkout clerk who looks exhausted. The grandchild who
needs to hear a story about when you were young. The friend who lost a spouse
and doesn't know how to fill the silence. These are the places where the
question meets us. These are the moments where we get to answer.
And here is the hope. When you answer in those small ways,
when you choose kindness over complaint, presence over withdrawal, hope over
despair, something shifts. Not in the world, not all at once, but in you. And a
changed person changes the people around them. And changed people change the
world. It is slow. It is almost invisible. But it is the only way it has ever
worked.
I think about the darkness I have lived through. The Cuban
Missile Crisis when we truly believed the world might end. The assassinations.
The riots. The wars that sent boys over and brought them back different. The
fear of disease before we understood it. And through all of it, what carried us
was not politics or policies or promises from people on television. What
carried us was one another.
It was the neighbor who brought soup when you were sick. It
was the friend who sat with you when you couldn't stop crying. It was the
stranger who smiled at you on the worst day of your life and reminded you that
you were still here, still breathing, still part of something.
That is what it means to be responsible toward life. Not to
fix everything, but to tend to what is yours to tend. To answer the question
that each day asks you with the only thing you truly have to give, which is
yourself.
If you are feeling the weight of
the negativity, if the world seems too loud and too angry and too far gone, I
understand. I feel it too. But I want to offer you something I have learned in
my 80 years.
The darkness is loud. It always has been. But the light is
persistent. And persistence wins.
You do not have to solve everything. You do not have to
argue with everyone. You do not have to carry the weight of the whole world on
your shoulders. You just have to answer the question that is right in front of
you today.
Maybe that question is, "Will you call your sister who
is lonely?"
Maybe it is, "Will you smile at the teenager who looks lost?"
Maybe it is simply, "Will you get out of bed and put your feet on the
floor and decide that today, in this small corner of the world, you are going
to be kind?"
That is enough. That has always been enough.
We are being questioned, every one of us, every single day.
And the beauty of being 75, 80, 85 and older is that we have spent a lifetime
learning how to answer and to ask our own questions. We have the wisdom they
cannot teach in schools. We have the perspective that only comes from watching
seasons change and people come and go and the world keep turning.
Let us use it. Let us be responsible toward life, not by
fixing everything, but by loving what is ours to love. By tending what is ours
to tend. By answering the question with the only thing that has ever mattered,
which is a heart that refuses to stop hoping.
The world needs us. Not our worry, not our fear, not our
resignation. It needs our hope. It needs our stubborn, hard-won,
seventy-years-in-the-making belief that morning always comes, that people are
basically good, that love is stronger than fear.
That is our answer. Let us give it generously.
