I Don’t Care

Liberation and Our Aging Brains

I guess there are great benefits to growing older. Note: I did not say “old.” If you’re blessed enough to escape the scourge of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and you’ve also escaped a life of insecurity and bitterness, you may begin experiencing the liberation of learning to separate noise from issues that matter and voice that distinction in three simple words.

As I wrote in my journal this morning, I thought about a politically active friend in our Monday night discussion group who, weekly, makes it a point to let us know his rabid views on whatever latest scandal wafts through our political structure and, via the media, into his cranial neurons, creating a miniature nuclear explosion of angry kinetic energy.

With a voice pitched somewhere between a smoke alarm and a wounded clarinet, he huffed at the group last night in a state of gnat-like frenzy over a certain Saturday night event that, according to him… no, forget it. I don’t even want to give credence to the words spewing from his mouth.

Why?

I don’t care.

And I told him just that.

Monday is the day I begin settling into the week. The night before, I write my Captain Ash’s Nightfall Meditation, post it, and then settle in for a relaxing evening to reflect on the peaceful words I put together.

It’s my therapy.

Yesterday, work was a joyful affair; we celebrated the boss lady’s birthday with lunch, her niece and grandniece came in from Washington State, and we enjoyed a perfectly pleasant day.

The calm quickly faded later at the discussion group, and when I told the emotional time bomb that I didn’t care about his self-inflicted crisis, he offered some choice insults. Boundaries matter, and I explained to him that his weekly tirades violate the one policy the group holds dear: no politi-speak. The rest of us, of mixed political affiliations, choose to keep it that way.

Before we adopted our “no politics” doctrine, the arguments were unbearable, and the group almost folded.

What amazed me about telling him I don’t care was that I said it to his face without an iota of hesitation. Perhaps when I was younger, being the mouse that I was, I was afraid to voice any dissenting opinion out of some kind of insecurity. In my immature mind, to disagree and voice my real opinion would render me “not liked” or, God forbid, rebellious, a mantle I now would be proud to bear.

As we age, if we are lucky and have done at least a little honest work on ourselves, something changes in the machinery of the soul. We stop mistaking every raised voice for authority, every insult for truth, and every demand for our attention as a summons from God.

People pleasers are often the most abused segment of any population.

The younger mind often wants permission before it speaks. It looks around the room, takes attendance of every possible judgment, and then decides whether it is safe to be honest. But the older mind, seasoned by loss, work, illness, disappointment, recovery, and the blessed humiliation of having been wrong a thousand times or more, begins to understand that confidence is not volume.

Confidence is alignment. It is the moment when the voice, the conscience, and the spine finally agree with one another. Isn’t this then the time we reach our authentic selves?

What say you? Feedback welcomed!

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