Why Do Old Men Stop Trying?
I’m sitting in my usual spot at Starbucks this afternoon, looking at another old guy who is in my line of sight. He is wearing a frayed, ill-fitting, untucked flannel shirt over an untucked T-shirt, along with a pair of baggy jeans. His clothes may be clean (I can’t tell), but nothing fits, nothing coordinates, and nothing suggests that he gave his appearance a moment’s thought before leaving home.
I see versions of him everywhere. Obviously retired, senior-aged men appear at coffee shops, grocery stores, and doctors’ offices dressed as though they are spending Saturday afternoon cleaning the garage. Their hair grows past the point of intention, and their beards occupy some uneasy territory between five-o’clock shadow and pure neglect. Shirts droop, pants sag, and shoes appear to have been selected simply because they were near the door.
Of course, maybe I’m being unfair. I know that old age can make seemingly simple things difficult. From firsthand experience, I know that arthritis complicates buttons and shoelaces, while chronic pain drains energy once available for grooming. Our bodies change, familiar clothes stop fitting, and fixed incomes limit what can be replaced.
Depression and loneliness can also express themselves through neglect. Sometimes a man who looks as though he has stopped caring has, in fact, stopped caring, but not without reason. Still, do those explanations account for all of what I am observing?
I suspect that many retired men simply decide they are finished making an effort. Who, after all, is going to call them out? The workplace once imposed minimum standards, and partnerhood may have supplied him with another person who noticed a stained shirt or suggested a haircut. Once those structures have gone away, some guys apparently decide that appearance no longer matters.
Me? I resist that conclusion. I get a haircut once a month. I shower and shave every day, wear clean clothes that fit, and try to look as though I knew I was going out in public when I got dressed. I even use body lotion in an attempt to smooth over some of my wrinkles.
Occasionally, finding clothes that fit requires more effort than simply taking something off the rack, though. Pants almost never come in precisely my size, so I buy the closest fit and have a seamstress alter them. I wear shorts, but not the voluminous old-guy (John Fetterman) kind that billow around the knees. I wear hoodies, too, provided they come in a size and cut that actually fit. My favorite, which I happen to be wearing today, says “HARVARD LAW (Just Kidding),” so clearly I am not arguing for formality. (My T-shirt, tucked in underneath, says “RESIST.”)
This is not vanity, or at least not entirely. I am not trying to look young, and I have no illusion that a well-fitting shirt or clean hoodie will disguise my age. (I am painfully aware that I am entirely invisible to younger women.) I simply want the clothes I wear to look chosen rather than surrendered to.
I am trying to look like a person who remains engaged with the world. Clothing is communication, even when we insist we are not communicating anything. Making some effort says that I expected to encounter other people today. It indicates that I recognize I am part of a shared environment and have not entirely withdrawn into my own private kingdom.
There may also be a question of dignity involved. Old age takes things from us without asking, including strength, balance, hair, smooth skin, and sometimes memory and the car keys. We cannot prevent every loss. Perhaps attending to my appearance is one small way of declining to decline.
I do not believe old men need expensive wardrobes, fashionable haircuts, or elaborate grooming rituals. A clean shirt that fits would accomplish quite a lot. So would shaving, or maintaining a beard as though one had deliberately chosen it.
The man across the room is entitled to dress however he pleases, and, as judgmental as this sounds, I am entitled to find the result dispiriting. What bothers me is not really his flannel shirt or baggy jeans. It is the possibility that they represent surrender, the idea that once a man retires and grows old, he no longer owes the visible world any sign that he is still participating in it.
This is where I come down: Even now at twelve years into retirement, I am not ready to give in. Tomorrow morning, I will shave, choose clothes that fit, and present myself to the world as someone who is still here. I encourage all you other old guys out there to give this some thought.
Soundtrack Suggestion
When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine,
birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
(“When I’m Sixty Four” — Beatles)
What is Leadership?
I frequently Zoom with a friend, CJ, on the East Coast. Our conversations are always stimulating, never boring. We both graduated from the same small-town Midwestern high school back in the 60s but, interestingly, it is only in the past couple of years that our relationship has deepened. Last year, during my trip back to rural Northern Wisconsin for our sixtieth-class reunion, she was one of just a couple individuals with whom I was eagerly anticipating some one-on-one time.
We are both academics, but because we spent almost six decades leading quite different lives, with only infrequent contact, we continue to learn more about each other with every interaction. During our last call, I mentioned that throughout most of my professional life I had occupied leadership positions. She hesitated, then interrupted with a simple but provocative question: “What is leadership?”
(For her own reasons, she’d been ruminating on this question for a while, and was interested in my take.)
I do not recall precisely how I answered. That probably means my response was not especially coherent. You might expect someone who spent decades in higher education administration, earned a doctorate in the field, worked as an academic dean, and has written extensively about leadership in these pages to have a polished definition ready for immediate deployment. I did not; I mostly rambled.
Since then, the question has stayed with me. So I’m here to wander around the topic yet again and to report that with more than twenty years of writing here in Musings, all signs seem to point, consistently, toward the same idea: leadership begins with trust.
A title may give someone authority to make decisions, approve budgets, evaluate employees, or call a staff meeting. It does not guarantee, however, that anyone will have trust in the person exercising that authority. Positional power can produce compliance, at least for a while, but compliance and followership are not the same thing.
When I first became an interim academic dean, I had never been a dean, department chair, or even a full-time faculty member. At my first divisional meeting, I told the story of my personal journey and shared the values I was bringing to the position. I believed that people needed to know the person asking for their confidence.
That experience helped convince me that authenticity is central to leadership. By authenticity, I do not mean turning every meeting into a confessional. I mean allowing people to see an alignment among one’s values, words, decisions, and behavior. That alignment is also how I understand integrity. It becomes most visible when remaining true to one’s values is inconvenient or risky. When words and actions match, people do not have to search constantly for hidden motives. A basis for trust has been established.
Leadership also depends upon listening. “Leaders,” so-called, often “listen” just long enough to formulate an answer or defend a decision. Genuine, active listening accepts that someone else may know something important, including something the leader would prefer not to hear. It communicates respect and makes an organization more intelligent. When people expect dismissal or retaliation, they remain silent, and the person naming a problem can become the problem.
Listening cannot necessarily tell a leader exactly what to do, however. My doctoral mentor, Thomas Schwandt, helped me approach the uncertainty that remains. He asked questions that slowed thinking down: What does this mean? Whose voices are absent? Given what we know, what should we do now? His questions taught me to examine both values and assumptions, mine and others, before acting. They also encouraged humility, since a sincere conviction can still be wrong.
Those habits shaped how I understood authority long before I became a college dean. Earlier, while I was working for the Oregon University System, one of our university presidents described my style as that of a “servant leader.” I had not consciously adopted the term, but I recognized myself in it. I had always believed that leadership was less about exercising power over people than using whatever authority I possessed on their behalf. I often told colleagues that whatever power came with my position amounted, in practice, to the power to persuade. The president had given a name to the way I was already trying to lead.
I have also always thought of myself as a consensus builder. That did not mean requiring unanimity or waiting until every objection disappeared. It meant bringing people into the process, finding common ground, and building enough shared ownership to move forward. Consensus was not an escape from leadership. It was one way of exercising it.
Together, these descriptions explain why I regard administration as a calling to service. A college exists to educate students and serve a larger public good. Administrators temporarily hold responsibility for a mission that will continue after they depart.
Service does not mean passivity, though, and listening does not eliminate the obligation to decide. Participation makes decisions more informed and legitimate, but responsibility cannot be distributed so broadly that no one remains accountable. Presidents must lead, boards must govern, and administrators must sometimes choose among competing interests.
A responsible leader invites the knowledge of those affected, communicates the reasons for change, makes the necessary judgment, and accepts accountability for what follows. Collaboration is not unanimous agreement, but neither is it a ceremonial conversation held after the real decision has already been made.
My recent writing about Lane Community College has tested these convictions from a different vantage point. As a retired administrator and community member, I have sometimes called for decisive action, including the resignation of a trustee and the nonrenewal of a presidential contract. That might appear inconsistent with my emphasis on collaboration, but listening is not leadership’s final act. A process that produces no accountability can become another form of avoidance.
All of this brings me back to CJ’s initial question. What is leadership, anyway? For me, leadership begins with trust, which grows when people experience a leader as authentic and know they are being heard. It means seeking consensus, encouraging collaboration, and bringing people together around a purpose they share. It also means acting when necessary and remaining accountable for the result.
Perhaps that university president had already supplied the shortest answer. Leadership is service. A title may identify who occupies the office, but it tells us little about whether leadership is occurring there. What matters is what a person does with the trust.
Soundtrack Suggestion
He roller-coaster, he got early warning
He got muddy water, he one mojo filter
He say, “One and one and one is three”
Got to be good-looking, ‘cause he’s so hard to see
Come together
Right now
Over me
(“Come Together” — Beatles)
The Weight of Books
I am in the process of getting rid of my book collection, and the experience has brought on a more profound sense of loss than I expected. I am not simply disposing of things I no longer need. As I remove the books from my shelves, I sometimes feel that I am losing pieces of myself.
Not long ago, I wrote about how my world is shrinking: fewer places to go, fewer things to do, fewer miles I can walk. I am even physically shorter. Now I am pondering another kind of shrinking as I continue to reduce the number of possessions I own.
I live in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom upstairs apartment in Eugene, and everything I have, except my car, fits inside it. That was not true when I lived down in Marin County before I retired. In addition to all the things in my apartment, I rented a storage room for stuff I no longer used but was reluctant to discard. One summer, perhaps around 2011, I decided to empty it and lighten my load. I did not finish the project that summer, but I continued working on it during weekends and time off. By the summer of 2014, after many, many trips to Goodwill, the recycling center, and the dump, the storage room was empty. It was then that I moved back to Eugene, bringing only what would fit into my current apartment.
As I approach my eightieth year, I have come to truly appreciate the wisdom of this undertaking. I now practice downsizing as a lifestyle not a project; I try to dispose of one old item for every new one I bring home. This has worked reasonably well, except when it comes to books. I have been a reader and collector for most of my life, although I do not acquire rare books or valuable first editions. Whenever I wanted to read a book, or was just interested in one, I simply bought it. Eventually, it joined the steadily growing number in my bookcases.
As a preteen and teenager, I read a great deal of science fiction. I spent summer days reading indoors while my mother implored me to go outside and play. Most of those early books have disappeared, but I still own a few paperbacks from high school, including the copy of George Orwell’s 1984 that was assigned reading.
As just mentioned, not all my former collections have survived. During my early days in graduate school, I owned what amounted to a rather ambitious chemistry library, but those books also disappeared gradually over many moves. Giving them up was an earlier version of what I am doing now, although I do not remember experiencing quite the same sense of loss.
The books that remained reflect the changing interests and circumstances of my life. They included contemporary novels and biographies; and more books about photography, counseling, psychology, self-help, spirituality, travel, and health; and a collection about Watergate that began with All the President’s Men. My later doctoral work added books on higher education, qualitative research, American Studies, organizational culture, the history and philosophy of science, and epistemology.
Most of the physical weight I have lugged from city to city has been books. I have packed them, hauled them up and down stairs, and transported them from one home to another. For years, I accepted this as a routine part of life. Now I am considering a move into a senior residential community, where I will likely live in a one-bedroom or studio apartment. I cannot take all these books with me, and storing them makes little sense. The practical conclusion is clear, but carrying it out has been painful. I now buy books on Kindle, allowing me to continue reading without refilling the shelves I am trying to empty.
During the past few months, I have disposed of perhaps 300 to 400 books, still less than half my collection. I have sold roughly equal numbers to a local used bookstore and a buyer in Illinois. When I visit the bookstore, I take three banker’s boxes, each containing ten to twelve books. One box is about as much as I can safely carry down my stairs, so I take them down and lift them into and out of my car one at a time. I often have to bring some books back home.
The Illinois buyer has an app that lets me scan the barcodes on newer books and learn immediately whether it will accept them. Many older paperbacks have no barcodes, reminding me how long they have been with me. Each shipping box contains only ten to twelve books because I must carry it downstairs and into the FedEx store. Eventually, in the not too distant future, I will have sold everything anyone is willing to buy. I will have to donate them.
I understand the practical reasons for doing this. By disposing of them, it is my hope that at least some will find their way to new readers. Still, none of that eases my sense of loss. Together, these books form a record of my life: what I was curious about, what I studied, what work I did, what illnesses worried me, and what questions I hoped to answer. Some remind me of who I once was; others, of who I was trying to become.
That is why this feels so different from emptying a storage room. When I gave away unused household objects, I felt I was disposing of mere possessions. When I give away my books, I feel I am severing the physical and emotional attachments to different periods of my life.
For now, I plan to keep two shelves of books, about six linear feet. They are signed by their authors, written by people I know, or connected in some way to the core of my being. My will contains instructions for their eventual donation. I am not saving them forever, only admitting that I am not ready to part with them right now.
Perhaps that is all I can do. I can reduce the collection one manageable box at a time, knowing that every book will eventually leave my possession. (Or perhaps, more accurately, I will leave them.) For now, the only choice left is which pieces of my life I can let go of today and which I need to keep a little longer.
Soundtrack Suggestion
