My father turned seventy last month, and I have written about him before, in another article, where I tried to describe how much of his late-life contentment seems to come from the long list of things he stopped needing somewhere in his fifties. I want to return to him here, because there is a more specific version of the same observation that I have been thinking about since, and that I think is worth setting down.
The more specific version is this. My father’s contentment, when I look at it carefully, is not really about what he has accumulated across his life. It is, much more accurately, about what he has stopped doing across his life. And what he has stopped doing is not, as the standard self-help framing might suggest, some grand renunciation of ambition or attachment. It is, on close examination, a long quiet inventory of three particular kinds of items, accumulated slowly over about thirty years.
The three kinds are these. The people he stopped trying to impress. The opinions he stopped trying to win. The certainties he stopped needing to defend.
None of these items, individually, would register as a significant life event. The cumulative effect of putting them all down, across decades, is what I am now beginning to recognize as the actual substance of what other people, looking at him, describe as his peaceful disposition. The disposition is not, on examination, something he was born with. It is, much more accurately, the structural residue of the inventory.
The people he stopped trying to impress
I want to start here, because this is the item I think I understand best, and because I have, in the last few years, started to recognize a small version of it operating in my own life.
My father, for most of my early childhood, was a man who calibrated, in various small ways, around the imagined judgments of a particular set of people. Some of these people were colleagues. Some were extended family members. Some were neighbors. Some were old friends from before I existed, whose opinions of him still carried weight in his internal accounting. The calibration was not visible, in any single moment. The calibration was, more accurately, the slight adjustment of his behavior that occurred whenever one of these audiences was, in some real or imagined sense, present in a room.
I do not think he was conscious of doing this. I think it was, by the time I was watching him, simply how he conducted himself in the world. The trying-to-impress was so thoroughly woven into his daily operating system that it did not, as far as I can tell, register as a separate activity. It was just, in some sense, who he was.
Somewhere in his fifties, this began to change. Not all at once. Item by item. I can identify, now, a few specific moments that, in retrospect, were the cessations.
There was the year he stopped buying a new car every three years and started keeping the old one. He did not announce this. He just, when the time came, did not replace the car. I asked him about it once, casually, and he said, with a small shrug, that the car was fine. The small shrug, I now understand, was the visible feature of a much larger internal event. He had, somewhere in himself, decided that whatever audience the three-yearly car replacement had been performing for was no longer, in his accounting, worth the performance. The audience was not formally dismissed. The audience was simply, by his actions, ignored.
There was the period, around the same time, when he stopped attending various professional functions he had been attending for thirty years. The functions had been, in the working-life ecology of his career, a small ongoing source of contact with colleagues and acquaintances. The functions were also, on examination, the venues at which a particular kind of performance had been required of him. He stopped going. The colleagues, in most cases, did not particularly notice. The acquaintances drifted. My father, when I asked about it, said the functions had become a bit much, and did not elaborate. I now understand the not-elaborating as part of the work. He did not need to defend the cessation to anyone, including me. The cessation was, in some real way, the point.
There was the slow dialing-down of his concern about what his own father, who lived until my father was sixty-two, thought of him. My grandfather was a difficult man, of the generation that did not give compliments and did rarely give comfort. For most of my father’s life, my grandfather had been one of the more imagined-glance-producing audiences in my father’s internal architecture. Somewhere in his fifties, my father stopped caring quite so much about my grandfather’s view of him. The change was so quiet that I noticed it only by its consequences. My father seemed lighter in conversations about my grandfather. The lightness was, I now think, the structural relief of having put down an audience that had been heavy for decades.
The people he stopped trying to impress are not, as a group, anyone I could name in a list. Many of them are dead. Many of them have drifted out of contact. Some of them are still alive and are still, in some technical sense, in his life, but they no longer occupy the position in his internal architecture they used to occupy. The architecture has been quietly reorganized, with these audiences removed from the load-bearing positions. The reorganization is invisible from outside. From inside, it has, on my father’s testimony, made the daily experience of his life considerably lighter than it used to be.
The opinions he stopped trying to win
The second category is, on examination, related to the first but structurally distinct. It involves not the audiences he stopped performing for, but the arguments he stopped trying to win.
My father, in his thirties and forties, was the kind of man who would push, in any given conversation, to make sure his point landed. He was not, by any reasonable measure, a difficult conversationalist. He was warm and curious and a good listener. But there was, in the way he conducted disagreements, a small ongoing pressure to get the other person to come around. The pressure was polite. The pressure was also, when you looked at it carefully, real.
Somewhere in his fifties, this also began to change. He started, I noticed, saying what he thought and then, if the other person disagreed, letting the disagreement stand. He did not, in most cases, follow up with the small additional pressure that would have been characteristic of him in his forties. He let the conversation move on. The disagreement remained on the table, unresolved, and he did not seem to require its resolution in order to feel that the conversation had gone well.
I want to be careful here, because the cessation I am describing is not, in any clear sense, the giving up of his views. He still has views. He still says what he thinks. He still, on the right subjects, can produce a long and considered argument. What has changed is the internal need for the other person to be persuaded by the argument. The argument can be made. The argument can be heard. If the argument does not land, the argument does not land. He can live with that.
The cessation of this need is, in my observation, one of the rarer items on the late-life inventory. Most older men of my father’s generation maintain the need to win arguments well into their seventies and eighties. The need is, in many cases, the engine of a great deal of late-life social friction. My father has, somehow, retired the engine. The retirement has produced, in his conversations, a particular kind of ease that other people register but cannot quite name.
I asked him about it once, indirectly, and he said something I have been thinking about since. He said that he had figured out, somewhere along the way, that most arguments are not actually about the subject of the argument. They are about something else underneath, usually something to do with the participants needing to feel a particular way about themselves. And he had decided, at some point, that he did not need other people to lose their arguments in order to feel a particular way about himself. The deciding was, I now think, the work. The deciding was done quietly. The deciding has been doing its work, in his daily life, ever since.
The certainties he stopped needing to defend
The third category is the one I find most interesting, partly because it is the one I see least often in men of my father’s generation, and partly because it is the one I least understand how to develop in myself.
The category involves the views my father held strongly, in his earlier life, that he has, over the past few decades, allowed himself to revise. Not the views he has rejected. The views he has revised. There is a difference. Rejection is a clean act. Revision is the slower and more uncomfortable work of allowing a long-held position to be modified by new information, without making a public project of the modification.
My father has done this, by my count, on a fairly wide range of subjects. Political views. Religious views. Views about how children should be raised. Views about money. Views about ambition. Views about what makes a life worth living. None of the revisions has been dramatic. Each of them, in retrospect, has been the slow drift of a position from one location to another, accomplished by my father, alone, in the privacy of his own thinking, across years.
What I find most striking about these revisions is what he has not done with them. He has not announced them. He has not apologized for the previous positions. He has not framed the revisions as growth, or as wisdom, or as anything else that would require, on his part, a particular kind of public performance. He has simply, over time, started talking about the relevant subjects from a different vantage point, and the new vantage point has become, by quiet accumulation, his current one.
This is, I want to suggest, one of the harder kinds of internal work available to an adult. Most people, when their views shift, either announce the shift (which requires a particular kind of public performance) or maintain the appearance of consistency by suppressing the shift internally (which produces a different kind of ongoing tension). My father has done neither. He has simply, by the slow internal work of revising, arrived at a different set of positions, and has not required anyone, including himself, to make a fuss about it.
The not-making-a-fuss is the work. The not-making-a-fuss is also, I now think, what produces a particular feature of my father’s daily conversation that is hard to describe but easy to recognize. He has, on most subjects, a particular kind of relaxed availability to whatever the conversation requires. He does not, generally, need to defend his previous positions. He does not, generally, need to assert his current ones. He is, in some real way, just where he is, on whatever subject is being discussed, and the just-being-where-he-is is, on examination, what other people experience as his peaceful disposition.
What I am, slowly, trying to learn
The honest acknowledgment is that I am, at thirty-eight, much earlier in this work than my father was at fifty. I still calibrate, in small daily ways, around audiences I have not yet found a way to dismiss. I still push, in conversations, to make my points land in ways that suggest I have not yet stopped needing the other person to be persuaded. I still defend positions that, on close examination, I am no longer entirely sure I hold.
What watching my father has given me, more than anything, is the existence proof that the work can be done. He started, somewhere in his forties, doing the slow inventory. He is now, in his seventies, the man whose contentment my generation finds remarkable and difficult to explain. The contentment is not mysterious. The contentment is the structural result of three decades of small cessations, performed quietly, without announcement, item by item.
I do not know whether I will, by seventy, have done as much of this work as my father has done. I do know, having watched him, that it is the work that produces what I want to have produced by then. The peaceful late life is not, on the evidence of my own father, a function of luck or temperament or accumulated assets. It is, much more accurately, the dividend that is paid out, late, to the people who have been doing the inventory all along.
I am, slowly, starting mine. The starting is awkward. The starting is also, on the evidence of my father’s life, the most important thing I am likely to do in the next thirty years.
