Delphic Maxim 146: As an old man (or woman) be sensible
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
146. As an old man be sensible
For all the qualities that you could possibly associate with old age, ‘sensibility’ seems to me one of the strangest. As people get older, that natural wisdom that comes with experience and age — the accumulated knowledge of millions of contexts and cases — seems to make them eminently sensible. Or at least wise, but then there’s a subtle expert mode of ‘sensible’ that accompanies that. Sometimes it seems like the logical process that our elders follow is strange, that it happens so automatically, but in actuality it may simply be that when you’ve seen a lot of patterns throughout your life you recognise them faster.
What if this maxim is talking about a different kind of ‘sensibility’? Perhaps in the sense that the epistemologists of the pre- and early Enlightenment might have used it. For these people (among that huge sweep of characters, Aristotle is one of the earliest), ‘sensibility’ referred to your ability to sense a context. It related to the senses — your sense-ability. So in old age, we need to preserve our sensibility as far as possible, even if age degrades it, or life numbs us. I generally have found our elders have a kind of elevated sensibility — not one grounded in the material world, but one that is attuned to the broader brush of time and the way it ravages a society that they have seen shift and change.
That kind of sense-ability is really probably the same thing as what we’ve come to understand as ‘being sensible’. I know we generally mean ‘don’t be silly’, ‘keep a lid on it’, or some other dour injunction. But silliness has its place in life too — and I’ve never met an old person who didn’t understand the value of good humour in life. Normans in particular age with good humour — I hope the same thing happens to me. My grandfather and his brothers and sisters were/are Yoda-like in their good nature. I’d never say anything but sensible, but that’s sensibility is tempered by kindness and joy. And care for others, which is important. But I reckon a sensible person probably cares for others anyway.
Too often we like to dichotomise. We think of sensible as the opposite of ‘silly’, and we reify the kind of seriousness that comes along with that. I like to think that the ancients didn’t actually mean for us to be quite so serious. Surely as they aged, they had the same inclination and desire to spend their later years laughing? They sure had a solid understanding of the value of friendship — it seems like an oversight to want to spend their time in seriousness and solitude.
It’s a while off for me yet, but in old age I’ll be sensible in both meanings of the word — aware of the world, and also responsible towards it. After a lifetime of growing and learning, what else could I possibly hope to be? All the time we look back on the past five, ten years, and we wonder where the time went. Or how we could change so much in what seems like such an instant. Imagine doing that across a lifetime — it’s both sobering and celebratory, and worthy of our senses.
