Stay Resilient: Further Advice From the No-Geezing Zone

Now and then, my inbox will overflow happily when one of these “Play in Mind” pieces strikes a nerve. Some correspondents chime in. Some contest the ideas. And some take me way beyond.

Nominating the infinitive “to geeze” for the next Webster’s International became one of these occasions.

To recap, I’d noted that though in Britain the geezer (the one who geezes) is a mate and a chum, in America, the geezer is grumpy. Grumpy and old. Grumpy and old and dismissive. Grumpy and old and dismissive and preoccupied with the world’s shortcomings. And though I resist giving advice because advice is usually a form of nostalgia and self-congratulation, this time I unreservedly advised my cohort to replace geezing with play.

Readers—mentors and friends on the cusp of geezerhood—responded. Let me turn this piece over to their points and perspectives.

Earning the Right to Complain

David, a mentor and a biking buddy, a prolific scholar, a deep thinker, a historian, and one of the four funniest people I know, also ties for first for recognizing irony. Once on a ride, I asked him how he was doing, and when he said, “can’t complain,” I nearly fell off my bike because he is also one of the world’s most hilarious kvetches. (After all, how can I put this mildly, if one studies history, it’s easy to find occasions when current-day society hasn’t lived up to its promise.) After reading my thoughts on geezing, David responded, “not so fast,” advancing age means that we have “earned the right to complain.”

And this made me feel less like a vocabulary scold if I yelp when reading “shoe-in” when the writer means shoo-in, cringe when the reporter says the missile “honed in” on its target, or harumph when the speaker substitutes “prostrate” for prostate. Incidentally, Reader’s Digest once ran a regular informative series about human anatomy and its complaints, the original organ recital. The titles always began “I am Joe’s (or Jane’s) …” The only thing that after all these years has stuck with me from the article, “I am Joe’s Prostate,” is that the talking gland gave geezers much to legitimately geeze over.

How Can Attentive Citizens Avoid Psychic Numbing?

Another correspondent, Pete, an old friend whose incisive arguments carried us to the podium in stage debates once upon a time, noted how geezers yield to “doom-scrolling.” And now, many years later, he zeroes in again, puzzling over how we can strike the balance between staying informed (a citizen’s responsibility) and “wallowing in despair when horrific things happen.” Trained in psychology, Pete asks, “What is the proper dose of horror that we should allow ourselves?” His is the penetrating question when news sources deliver a steady stream of outrage and shock. But to turn away is unsafe, too. The danger of denial, of “glibly stepping over the bodies of today’s casualties,” he notes, could result in a kind of psychic numbing. And, once numbed, Pete writes, we find ourselves in danger of losing connection to the “city, country, and world in which (we) have one small voice to help effect change.”

Geezing as Shrinking Into Oneself

Tom Henricks, a sociologist and one of North America’s foremost play theorists, though retired from teaching, keeps up an ambitious writing schedule. Despite his commitments, he recognizes the risk of “creeping geezery” in small things like too-painstaking attention to televised sports or over-zealous monitoring of stock market increments. But in contemplating the larger threat of “geezerhood,” Tom joins Pete in noting how we can put ourselves “at the mercy of external emotion generators.” And the results, Tom says, can encourage us to adopt a protective posture of “defensive individualism,” which risks losing those vital social and civic connections that Pete cites. The unhappy results also include the personal dangers of “sticking to old formulas, not learning new things, and, most of all, in declaring a list of things one will no longer do. All that means shrinking into oneself—to reaffirm who he has been rather than who he can be.”

Play as Antidote to Geezing

Yet, Tom wrote, “Optimism has a fighting chance of defeating pessimism; the fun of play beats fear and anxiety.” A string of friends chimed in. Lisa, who “strives to be anti-geeze,” celebrated a landmark birthday by attending a raucous and joyous gender-bending nightclub performance with a troop of well-wishers half her age. She wanted to know if this counted as anti-geezing. All together now, “Lisa, yes it does!” Kevin fought back by scoring two front-row tickets at a Ringo Starr concert, where “geezers broke all the rules.” The 81-year-old Beatle alum, himself a model of geezer resistance, Kevin observes, never took a break all night.

Etheldra counteracts the “horror of the news” with the “three sweet grandchildren that [she sees] regularly for play.” And she concludes, “they save my spirit.” As for me? I try to log between 100 and 150 miles on my road bike along the blue Niagara and Erie Canal every week. Sounds like work but feels like play. Another Scott resists geezerhood in daily 10-mile walks with comedy podcasts on the earbuds; nevertheless, as a further preventative, his wife Margie wears a “Geezer’s Wife” t-shirt. Nosing his boat out into a cold Muskoka lake, the first cruise after the long winter season, Scott found himself up a creek when the Ontario Provincial Marine Police Unit asked him to produce the usual official documents. He placated them with a geezer act. “Well, Margie, now just where’d I put that blasted paperwork?”

The Last Word: Resilience!

Let’s let my colleague Stuart Brown, M.D, retired surgeon and psychiatrist, author and lecturer, doubles tennis player and bon vivant, and, nearing 90, perhaps the country’s premier play advocate, have the last word about resilience: “Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor. Good players generally handle aggression and humiliation well. The non-player acts like, and is a victim, with a victim’s narrowed outlook.”

Onward!