The Second Innings

On the day of retirement, the office garlands you with flowers. Cake is cut over tea, a silver-tongued colleague offers a few warm words, and by evening you are sent home with a pen or a wristwatch. The next morning, the man whose signature once set files moving sits on his veranda, staring at that watch, which now ticks for nobody. We call it “honourable retirement.” In truth, it is our most courteous form of exile, served inside our own homes.
This is no literary flourish. The numbers say so. According to an amendment bill tabled in the National Assembly, the last census counted roughly 15 million Pakistanis above the age of sixty, about seven percent of the population. The Islamabad Capital Territory Senior Citizens Act, 2021, is on the statute book, yet the same bill’s statement of objects concedes that, for want of framed rules, many elders have never received what it promised. A 2015 survey in Rawalpindi found that 88.3 percent of 384 elderly respondents felt lonely, and the loneliest reported more hypertension, heart trouble and diabetes. A study of shelter homes in Karachi traced abandonment to children migrating for work and to a coarsening of manners at home. Old age here is not merely a problem of the body. It is a famine of attention.
Into this famine came an unlikely knock on the door: The 80-Year-Old Wall, by the Japanese psychiatrist Hideki Wada. It was Japan’s best-selling book of 2022, with close to 535,000 copies sold by the year’s end. Its central message, as the publisher presents it, is that instead of enduring what you dislike, you should do what you love. Read critically, the book’s real strength lies less in its advice than in its tone. In a society where people live longest and, often, fall most silent, Wada had the nerve to treat an old person first as someone who still wants things, and only then as a patient. Its weakness lies in the same place, because “do as you please” does not mean the same thing in every household. Under Japan’s pensions and health cover, that freedom is a philosophy. Here, where an elder often pays for his own medicines, it can become a luxury. Read the book, then, as a question and not a prescription.
Alongside it has come a bouquet of forty-four short sayings for the elderly, which I take to be collective wisdom, the Japanese author included. It is the kind of wisdom that passes from hand to hand until it belongs to no single pen, much like our proverbs. Keep walking. When anger rises, breathe deeply. The more you chew, the more alive your mind and body stay. Eat fresh fruit and salad. Stop learning and you grow old. Sunlight, too, is a joy. Do something for others. Live cheerfully and share your smile. Living alone is not loneliness; it can be peace. Reading them, one has the odd sense that the evening gatherings of our grandmothers and neighbourhood elders have been pressed onto a single page. The difference is that they arrive here under a Japanese psychiatrist’s name, in fresh light. It is a curious fact of human nature that wisdom gets a better hearing when it comes from far away, though the same words lay in our own courtyards for generations.
One of the forty-four speaks directly to our homes: find a family doctor as soon as you can. Our elders drift between doctors, or between the neighbourhood hakim and WhatsApp remedies. A physician who has known you for years, listens to you and sees the whole map of your medicines may be worth more than any new pill. Wada says as much in another of his books: if you suspect a medicine is leaving you listless, speak to your doctor at once, and choose a doctor willing to hear it. The message, in the end, is to keep the reins of your own life in your own hands and never stop asking questions.
But the real story is bigger than Wada, and science is catching up with collective wisdom. In 2002, Becca Levy and colleagues at Yale published a study of 660 people. Those with a positive view of their own ageing lived, on average, seven and a half years longer, and the gap survived adjustment for age, sex, income, loneliness and health. The authors found the effect larger than the gain from exercise, from quitting smoking, or from keeping weight down. Consider the harmless jokes we repeat: “What is left for us? We belong to bygone times.” They may be a dangerous psychological prescription. This research is for the old, and just as much for those who silence them with “what will you do now, anyway?”
At Stanford, Laura Carstensen and her team tracked people’s daily emotions for over a decade. They found that emotional well-being improves with age, moods grow steadier, and those whose days held more positive than negative feeling were more likely to be alive thirteen years later. Her explanation is that when time feels limited, people spend it on what truly matters. The old man meets fewer people, but better. If we strip him of that right and make him a prisoner of every condolence visit, every wedding, every ceremonial appearance, we wrong his wisdom. Harvard’s study of adult life, running since 1938 and now directed by Robert Waldinger, makes a related point: the quality of our relationships keeps us both happier and healthier. One finding should be pinned above every retiree’s desk. The happiest people in retirement were those who deliberately replaced their work colleagues with new “playmates.” Here, friendship tends to shrink to three places: the mosque courtyard, the thara at the street corner, and the television lounge. If, in every locality, a retired teacher, engineer, nurse and bank officer met twice a week in one spot, that corner could become a university.
Honesty, though, demands some questions of this good news. A positive outlook is not a guarantee of long life, only a possibility. If we tell every sick, lonely elder to “change your thinking,” we blame the illness on the patient. Levy’s own work warns that contempt for the old springs from social attitudes, not from individual temperament. The same caution applies to Ellen Langer’s famous 1979 experiment, in which men near eighty lived a week in surroundings staged as 1959. It is often retold as if the secret of youth had been found. Langer herself admits she lacked the funding for several control groups. It was a small experiment. Treat it not as magic but as a possibility. And one more thing must be admitted: the problem is doubled for elderly women. Widowhood, economic dependence and exclusion from decisions deepen their silence. Before we tell them to “do what you love,” we must hand them the authority to choose.
None of this is new. It has simply come back in a new tongue. In 44 BC, Cicero, writing On Old Age, listed four charges against growing old: it pulls us from active life, weakens the body, robs us of pleasures, and brings us close to death. Then, one by one, he answered them. His Cato mentions learning Greek in old age, which is to say, there is no age for learning. Yet we should remember that Cicero spoke with the voice of privilege, a man with land and leisure in his old age. Carrying wisdom to every class is our work. In the nineteenth century, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” gave the same idea to a soldier’s voice, and its last line still rouses an idle wish: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. And our own Ghalib, conceding the defeat of the body, still said:
My hand may not stir, yet my eyes hold some life;
leave the wine-cup and the flask before me a while yet.
Our faith, too, teaches a tenderness toward the old that should shame our indifference. The Qur’an, speaking of parents in old age, forbids even a sigh of impatience and commands gentle speech. And the Prophet’s saying, in meaning, is that one is not of us who does not honour his elders. But honour does not mean propping an elder on cushions and leaving him there. It means giving him room to offer opinions, to decide, to contribute. A man shut out of every decision is respected only for show, and show-respect soon curdles into silence.
So what is to be done? On the evening before retirement, ask what you will have the morning after. A hobby, a craft, a question still unanswered? Go once a week to the neighbourhood school and tell the children a story. Trade an hour of your experience with a young person for an hour of learning the phone. Tire your mind a little every day, because the organ that works is the organ that lives. And if you are a son or daughter, begin asking your parents one question each day: “What does your heart want today?” No medicine, no home remedy, is stronger than that.
Because a person dies twice: once when the breath stops, and once when the learning stops. The first is beyond us. The second is not. If an old man in Rome could piece together the letters of a new language in his twilight, why shouldn’t our retired headmasters, schoolteachers, bank officers and old soldiers do the same? The wall will come. But whoever still holds a question, a letter, a wish does not stop before it. He builds a door in it. Sixty is not the close of play. It is the second innings.