THE ROAD AT THE END OF THE RUT

Very often of late in my various Japanese bureaucratic editings having to do with Japanese society I come across worrisome phrases like "the growing proportion of elderly," "the increasingly aging society" and suchlike catchall concepts by which millions of persons and their collective wisdom are bundled together anonymously like a big social tumor or something.

Twenty years ago I didn't take much notice of such phrases because I wasn't in the elder group yet (if ever I would be); but now that I am, I find these socially fretful cliches patronizing, as if we silver foxes were all a big unwonted burden - perhaps even an imminent coronary in the body public - when in fact we are the wiser part of the public heart, the experienced portion of the social brain.

Among the many 60-pluses there are of course individuals who all their lives have always done what they were instructed to do and taken the paths they were directed to take, following their lives like a rut in the road: it may very well be that for their portion of the aging society there are cataractous and sclerotic times ahead: what happens when after a monodimensional lifetime your rut runs out into a multiplicity of dimensions, requiring a rennaissance history of diverse perceptions and multifaceted actions?

What happens when in your latter years you realize that you've spent all your life following the dictates of phantom uberfolks who had no idea who you really were or what you really loved (nor did they care), that perhaps you'd even had to be told what to be and what to want: could there be a greater disappointment than such a discovery at the end of the rut? What greater mockery than that open road flaunting its freedom now, after all these decades? It's that kind of person who frets about the "the increasingly aging society" and "the growing proportion of elderly."

As for the rest of us elders and wisers, we can take care of ourselves, the way we have all our lives; the road has taught us how.