NS GovLab: Making Room for Compassion and Innovation by Susan MacLeod
Two weeks ago, a couple up the road from us, in their 80’s and whom we’d met from time-to-time at neighbourhood gatherings, invited my husband and me to the Italian Club for movie and pizza night.
Our first impulse was to decline. We’re only in our 60’s you know. We can’t be hanging out with people in their 80’s. But realizing the ageism in that, and realizing there aren’t many people in their 40’s banging down our door for socializing, (just other 60-somethings e-mailing) we accepted.
Despite a rather nerve-wracking ride into town with the older gentleman at the wheel, we had a most pleasant evening.
The movie was called Mid-August Lunch and it was charming. A man in his late 50’s lives at home in Rome to look after his mother in her 80’s. He’s kind to her and does his duty, but he’s a little tortured, perhaps drinking and smoking too much.
Because he doesn’t work, he has many debts. On the eve of the long mid-August holiday in Rome, one of his creditors comes to collect. When the man can’t pay, of course, the creditor suggests that in lieu of money, he bring HIS mother to the apartment for care during the holiday.
With no other choice, the man reluctantly agrees, only to find his creditor arrive with his mother AND his older aunt.
Other creditors get wind of the scheme, and the beleaguered man finds himself having to host four women in their 80’s during the holiday, cooking the big celebratory meal for them under their conflicting directions, and generally trying to maintain his sanity and some order while herding this very single-minded group of older cats.
He rises to the occasion and the movie ends with everyone either dancing or napping.
The movie is gentle, respectful and delightful, with an underlying sense of kindness and joy.
On the drive home from the Italian Club, our own host chuckled and said to his wife, “You know, one day we’ll be like those women!”
In the back seat my eyebrows shot to the roof, and I stifled the urge to exclaim, “But you ARE like those women in their 80’s, you’re exactly like them, right now!”
And then I had a realization. Perhaps in the human-centered design world, you’d call it an understanding of the emotional context.
My realization, probably not at all original, was that next to none of us feel the age we are. Inside, no matter what our chronological age, I’m coming to see we all think we’re somewhere between 32 and 42. Perhaps 22, if you’re younger than 32. Nobody really thinks they’re old. I’ve seen this in nursing homes too, where I hang out regularly.
In my experience with NS GovLab, this is the kind of empathetic human-centred realization the project is designed to foster, because NS GovLab is about humans, being with humans, understanding humans, and working with humans for the sake of humans.
I’m currently reading the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Where I am now in the book, he’s proposing that as the homo sapiens population grew after the agricultural revolution, it became imperative for us to develop and learn both language and mathematics in order to keep track of trade on a large scale.
He writes, “In order to function, . . . people who operate a system . . . must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants . . . The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view the world. Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.”
And that itself has created some very complex problems for sapiens, such as a failure to accommodate the very human impulse to age and to need care.
To me, the experiment that NS GovLab is undertaking seeks to counteract not just aging, which in and of itself is NOT a problem, but to view aging in human ways, beyond the limits of how aging is viewed in traditional linear, system and economic ways of thinking.
Being a rather holistic and associative person myself, I couldn’t have been more delighted to have found NS GovLab. MY tribe has finally surfaced. Where were you when I was 22?
I enjoyed my time in Cohort 1. I learned a lot and I discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, a lot about myself. I saw ways of viewing our Sapien situation that had never occurred me, and, above all, I saw room being made for compassion.
Now, my small group in Cohort 1 didn’t succeed in creating a project that definitely addressed social isolation among older adults or established a resilient inter-generational community, but we laid some seeds. One of the private schools we interviewed as part of our inquiry work hosts a mother and newborn drop-in session on Monday mornings. As a result of talking to us, they’re trying to find ways to invite isolated seniors in their neighborhood to join the group as well.
And as a result of the group I was in during the Creative Media workshop, Sacred Heart School and Saint Vincent’s Nursing Home are exploring together the possibility that students going into junior high might be paired up with a resident at the Saint Vincent’s for regular readings of books that interest them both, a pairing that would last the three years of junior high.
The idea was prompted by an interview with a Saint Vincent’s employee and allows residents to look forward to having a regular and ongoing relationship with a student, and the student would gain an understanding of aging. I do hope these ideas generated in NS GovLab bear fruit.
To those who are in newer cohorts, my wish is that you can make progress on an initiative. No matter how small that progress may seem, it may just lead that to something bigger you didn’t expect but that has impact, even just a small one.
I also wish for you that in the process of trying, and failing, and trying again, as we sapiens do, that you find your eyebrows shooting to the roof in amazement at a new realization about the all the profundity that lies within the vicissitudes of aging.
Susan MacLeod is a fellow from the 1st Cohort of NS GovLab. Susan is a graphic facilitator, a storyteller, a speaker, a communications professional, and a comic artist. You can see her work in Spiral Bound and visit her work on Instagram at Humans of Saint Vincent’s. This article is adapted from Susan’s remarks held at NS GovLab’s open house on July 12, 2019.
