Uncovering the Art of Care with Dr. Derek Goldman

Show Notes

Caregiving is a radical act of empathy. To give care is to recognize the needs of another and provide support and companionship. All of us have received care at some point in our lives, and many of us will provide care in one way or another. Yet, the concept of care often goes underexplored, leaving caregivers unrecognized and their contributions undervalued. 

In honor of National Caregiver’s Month, we’re joined by Stage Director, Playwright, Producer and scholar, Dr. Derek Goldman, to discuss his ground breaking play The Art of Care. This production, developed in part by its ensemble, tells a powerful story made up of real-life narratives. It shines a light on the sacrifice, hardship, and profound beauty that define the caregiving experience. 

Episode Transcript

Matt Thompson:

Hello, and welcome to This Is Growing Old, the podcast all about the common human experience of aging. My name is Matt, and I’ll be your host. Caregiving is a radical act of empathy. To give care is to recognize the needs of another, and provide support and companionship.

All of us have received care at some point in our lives, and many of us will provide care in one way or another. Yet, the concept of care often goes underexplored, leaving caregivers unrecognized, and their contributions undervalued.

This National Caregivers Month, I had the privilege of checking out a play that dives deeply into the importance of care and caregiving, The Art of Care. This production, developed in part by its ensemble, tells a powerful story made up of real-life narratives.

It shines a light on the sacrifice, hardship, and profound beauty that define the caregiving experience. Joining us today to discuss the radical practice of care is the conceiver and director of The Art of Care, Dr. Derrick Goldman.

Dr. Goldman is an award-winning international stage director, playwright, producer, festival director, adapter, divisor, curator, and published scholar. He serves as Artistic and Executive Director at the Laboratory for Global Performance in Politics, a unique organization that is both a global destination for students, and an expansive network of global collaborators. And today he’s here with us on This is Growing Old. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

It’s great to be here, Matt, thank you.

Matt Thompson:

Shall we jump right in?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Sure.

Matt Thompson:

So, could you tell us a little bit more about your beginnings in the theater? What initially drew you to the stage?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Sure. I grew up in the Boston area, and I really found theater in high school. I was in Brookline Massachusetts, at Brookline High School, a big public high school. And I was very fortunate that, when I stumbled into theater, I had been a sports kid who was into lots of things, and theater, I stumbled into it a little bit randomly.

But there was a program there called the Brookline Educational Theater Company, and the model of that was that the high school students were writing, creating shows about social issues, pressing issues in the community, in conversation with with adult community members, sometimes parents, sometimes others.

This was the mid to late 1980s. So, these were shows about drug and alcohol abuse, they were shows about freedom of expression. And so, my first real exposure was less… Most high schools were doing that musical, or whatever. And so, my first exposure was actually really in connecting in things that I was already interested in that were questions about who I was and what was going on in the world.

And so, that model, it just gave me an early intergenerational sense of the power of theater to engage in real community questions. And in some ways, you can draw a straight line through that for my interests, the ways that I just stayed interested.

Then, living through the AIDS epidemic, which had played a big role in my life, and lost friends and family members. I was an undergraduate at Northwestern during that, and starting to create theater out of the grief and loss and rage and political questioning that living through that had.

So, in some ways, my journey of working at the intersection of theater; justice, politics, social change, all comes from just happening to come upon that at an early age.

Matt Thompson:

So, theater was your great awakening. You began to discover yourself and the world through the craft. And before that, you said you were a sports kid. Were you pursuing sports? Was that something you wanted to do growing up, or were you just floating around?

There’s a lot of things pulling us from or distracting us from some of those, what I see as core human impulses to connect.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah, I was a lover of sports. I don’t think I was pursuing it anymore… I didn’t have any illusions that I was on my way to become a professional athlete, but I would say that I… There’s kids you hear about who knew they loved theater from when they were six years old, or something. I was definitely not that kid.

So, I think it was more, when by the time I found theater, it was as a connected outlet for other things I was already interested in, and it was less… I did some acting and some directing early on, et cetera, but in some ways it was less about theater as theater, and more about theater and, like, what can theater…

And that’s a question, in different ways, I’ve been asking life, which is, what does this art form offer us? What does it mean to come together, as we’ve been doing for thousands of years, in communal spaces, to bear witness to a story, to each other’s humanity?

And I know the project we’ll be talking about is The Art of Care. In some ways, for me, the interest in it was less about innovating for its own sake, and in some ways I feel it’s returning us, restoring us to some of the ancient functions of ritual, of theater, of storytelling, of bearing witness to others.

Which, I think, in today’s world of… There’s a lot of things pulling us from or distracting us from some of those, what I see as core human impulses to connect.

Matt Thompson:

Right. So, what is it about theater that makes it such an effective vessel for advocacy and discourse?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah, I would say, why I think it can be those things, I don’t think by definition it always is effective at those things, and I think in some ways, look, I think sometimes, the strength of a thing is also its weakness. Theater happens in very local embodied ways, so it’s not a mass form of entertainment.

Of course, something like Hamilton can happen and create a more seismic wave of change. But basically, theater is an ephemeral art form. It’s about a group of people gathered in a space for a duration of time to hear a story, and we’re breathing the same air, we’re bearing witness to each other in that moment.

Shows, I’ve always been interested in shows that can be different every day, every night. I think that’s part of its power. I just feel we’re not just seeing something that’s like washer and repeat.

And I think at the core of the whole idea of theater, going back to what’s considered the first Western play, which is The Persians, Aeschylus, at the core of that play was empathizing with the enemy in the context then of the Peloponnesian War.

And the Greeks was telling a story in the context that theater has the power to make us look at another human being who might be 10 feet away from us and go, “Well, politically, that person is my enemy. I disagree with that person, but I can’t deny their fundamental humanity.”

And I think what I have found as an educator now and as a theater-maker, is that things that, when I was growing up, were not that radical, just what we did coming together in a circle and doing theater exercises, breathing. It actually feels more radical now when I bring people together and say, “Leave your phones at the door.

We’re going to actually look at each other, we’re just gonna breathe together, we’re gonna connect with each other, we’re gonna listen to each other, we’re gonna recognize each other’s humanity over the next hour, couple of hours, we’re gonna do some call-and-response.”

And I think those muscles, those basic muscles, we carry into these spaces so much anxiety, fear, trauma, other things. And so, a lot of what I think I’m trying to do with this work is just bring people back towards themselves and one another in what are really very simple, straightforward ways.

And I think, of course there’s other spaces, I think some people get that experience from other kinds of rituals, whether that’s community rituals or religious rituals. But I think theater, because it’s rooted in story, and the fact that we all have stories to tell, we’ve all had experiences.

And I think, for me, there’s still a huge difference between being in a room with other living, breathing human beings and experiencing a story alone in my living room on Netflix or on my phone or on my device. Not that those don’t have their own value and power, but there’s something…

And I think it actually gets more and more radical to come together. And I think that’s part of what we were interested in The Art of Care with the kinds of stories we were telling, is that the kinds of humanity and vulnerability and embodied experiences that Art of Care is activating and wanting to be about are actually not things that, they’re very stigmatized, they’re not things we see a lot of media about.

A lot of care happens, of course, behind closed doors, in private. And so, the function of an intimate communal space of theater to be like, “Oh, we can share these stories. It’s okay, I have mine, you have yours, let’s offer them to each other.”

It feels like theater is actually a really beautiful place to do that, and offers us something different than I feel a television show or a film or even other kinds of art forms would.

Matt Thompson:

Yeah, it’s the temporality of theater, the fact that you can’t replay it makes everything that’s happening on stage all the more significant to you. And then, on top of that, you have to reckon with what’s going on on the stage in real time.

The antagonist could be in a person right there in front of you. When I walked into the theater that Sunday, I did not have a narrow idea of caregiving, but working in aging research and healthy aging, I tend to consider it from a single perspective, which is senior caregiving.

But what I witnessed instead was this multidimensional perspective on care. It highlighted vulnerability across age, culture, circumstance. Why do you think it’s important to broaden our understanding of what it means to care?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

I think a word that came up a lot in our work and that I think I’ve learned is central in movements around care is the idea of interdependence, that in so many ways as human beings, we are interdependent, and we tended, as certainly in an American context, to value, and put independence first over interdependence.

And I think, for me, what this project allowed me to see, because we were really weaving a tapestry around the stories and lives of seven very different individuals and their relationships to care, but the stitches of the stitching of that tapestry spread very broad, wide.

Because one of the ensemble members is a Syrian refugee whose relationships to understanding care come very specifically from her experiences out of Assad’s dictatorship in Syria to her experiences as a refugee first in Beirut and then in the United States.

So, she’s thinking both about health, what’s happened to her body, and she has had experiences with healthcare, but they’re inextricably entwined with questions of systemic, institutional, political, questions of justice and collective care, and how cultures and countries do and don’t care, how fear gets instilled in people so they don’t trust each other, what that does to the psyche of a person, to the body, to the body politic.

And so, in some ways, I feel this was less… My job with this piece was really just to ask people what care meant to them, and then, to listen deeply and follow the strands. But then, I felt my job was, instead of hierarchicalizing my own sense of, “Oh, this play really should be about end-of-life care, or this story more,” I became very interested that all of these not only matter, but are connected, that there’s ways, if we think about care and if we think about…

One of our questions was really about, how does putting care at the center of our understanding of our human life and work in the world reframe some of our ways of thinking about other things, whether that’s about politics, whether that’s about justice, whether that’s about parenthood. There’s all kinds of…

So, I think, for me, it’s been… People were like, “Well, that sounds like it’ll be everything and the kitchen sink,” but what I think, actually, what makes it not that is the threading, the specifics and the details of individuals.

And we recognize that at any one moment in whatever circumstance we’re in, we may be having a personal relationship to care through the loss of a loved one or an illness, but it’s embedded in all kinds of socio-political realities.

Like the question of how, who’s paying for that care, what kinds of bureaucracy are we moving through to get the care, what’s the toll that it’s taking, what are the systems that are or aren’t letting us out of work to care for a loved one, all those things are part of that story. And I think, often, we just look at one of them.

Like, if we’re watching a television show about a hospital, we may be seeing one lens of one piece of that, but we’re not actually looking. And I think, for me, The Art of Care project was a way to try to bring those together.

The other thing that I just would say that this project… that I became interested in is, what does it mean as artists, and thinking about that broadly, to think about art as something that actually might do the work of care or be part of the work of care, and not only art about care, but what does it mean to imagine, and not just imagine, but to enact, that part of our work as artists is to work, to provide, to offer care.

We understand now that arts experiences are being prescribed, in various contexts, around the world for medical purposes as part of people’s wellbeing, but I think that’s still a big new idea for a lot of people, that the arts aren’t just, oh, it’s something extra you can go do on a Friday night if you have the money and feel like it, or a cool fun thing, that they’re not necessarily seen as part of the essential core of our wellbeing.

But historically, societally, they have been imagined as that. And I think we’ve decoupled those things. And so, for me, part of the piece is really trying to think about our role, as theater-makers, as not just doing a play about care, but hopefully, offering at least a window into what care might feel like or look like.

And I felt, I think for me, one of the most gratifying things about the production is how many people in the community seemed to be finding not just a kind of, “Oh, I was moved by those people’s experiences,” but that they were finding, for themselves, some healing, some beginnings at least of a new something that they needed.

And that felt like maybe it wasn’t going to answer all of their care needs, but at least for those couple of hours or for the next steps, that it felt like it was offering some care. And that, for me as an artist, at this stage of my work and life, I want to be doing work.

The world is so broken in so many ways, I want to be trying to do work that offers people something more than just escapist entertainment or even interesting insights, but that offers them something more nourishing than that.

Matt Thompson:

Yeah, I feel a lot of the audience saw their own stories in the narratives of the ensemble as well, and I think that is amazing. One thing I walked away realizing was that my story, or the folks who are around me who feel that the things that in our lives that are pretty insignificant, very mundane, are actually pretty radical when you think about it in context of caring and caregiving, who’s looked out for me and who I’ve taken care of.

Any of those stories on stage felt like they could have been someone that I knew personally, and it’s someone that I do know personally. I thought that was super profound. So, one of the core elements of The Art of Care were those lived experiences in the narratives of the ensemble.

Which were developed through your In Your Shoes method of playwriting, which you created in partnership with the Laboratory for Global Performance in Politics. Can you break down what this method is, and what role empathy plays, or what role empathy played in producing this work?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Sure. Yeah, In Your Shoes is basically a method that, in some ways, is very elemental. It’s about building trust in a community setting through some exercises in deep radical listening and call-and-response, just noticing what’s present in the room among any group.

And then, pair conversations, two-person conversations, usually off of a prompt. In this case, a prompt might be as broad as, what does care mean to you, or tell me a story about care in your life. The two people are having that conversation, and they’re recording it.

And it’s not an interview, it’s really, it’s just a genuine two-way conversation that hopefully they might want to have anyway, that they’re trusting each other enough to share, but it has that intimacy and energy of, not of a formal presentation, but of a conversation.

And then, they go away and listen to the recording, curate sections that move them, and transcribe the other person’s words, and then bring that back. And so, just as you were saying before about your own experience watching the play and feeling like things that might have seemed mundane or feeling insignificant, that’s so much of what happens in the In Your Shoes process.

Because it’s such a process of, you’re really… of self-discovery because your own words are being brought back by the other person and into the group. And what happens, for me, over and over again with this work is that we as human beings are very quick to edit out or police our own stories as banal, not that interesting, or not that worth telling.

And I think it’s a combination of our own self-consciousness, vulnerability, like, “You don’t need to know about me,” our genuine humility sometimes. I’m more interested in your story, so we don’t tell it. And it’s also because there’s a labor of telling it to a group, to taking the space, but with one person, we might.

And then, if that person… So many times when I do this, people are just just surprised by the resonance of their own story once they’re not the ones who’s telling it. It also allows them to notice what’s landing in a different way. And so, most of the pieces in The Art of Care, that’s how they were built.

Sometimes in conversations with me, and I was reflecting back, sometimes with the actors and each other. And then, in many cases, for this production, those transcripts are actually put back in the words of the mouth of the person who originated them, so they’re actually telling their own stories.

But what I feel is, they’re telling them differently than if they had written them or prepared them for a presentation because we’re still getting the energy of how they chose to say it to this one person. And so, we tend, in that space, I think, we’re less polished, we’re not trying to perfect it.

You catch us in the moment of, which I think is a beautiful human moment, which is the moment of trying to articulate what we mean, but not necessarily being certain about what we mean, remembering in the moment.

And so, that provides an, I think, intimate and vulnerable lens because people are really sharing offhand, from the heart what’s happening to them, and not trying to worry about how it’s going to be received.

Matt Thompson:

I feel, in so many amazing ways, we’ve answered this next question, but is there anything else you would like to add about the importance of amplifying lived experiences in your craft?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

I think that, to me, that’s a beautiful, just, way of saying what I think In Your Shoes offers. What I find, for me, as the superpower of this work right now is that it’s not about opinion, who’s right or who’s wrong, who’s smartest, it’s not really about advancing an argument.

It’s not even really about… Of course, so much narrative, and I love theater and films that do this, and it’s not really about the suspense or having a trick up your sleeve or surprising somebody with this twist that comes in at the end. It’s actually really about attuning us, returning us to a capacity to notice things that we take for granted in each other’s humanity.

And I think we’re just so good at going into rooms… We recognize, if we’re in a room with 20 other people, that they must have all these lived… Intellectually we know that they all human beings among us have these amazing, profound, intimate experiences around, for example, care and caregiving, that people have lost, that people have been through things.

But we don’t… As a habit, we just ignore that. It’s not what we’re there to do, so we’re very good at ignoring that that’s true, even as we know it’s true. And I think so much of this work is about reminding us that, elements of the things. And I feel once you know those things, it becomes much harder to put people at the same distance than to say, “Ah…”

To dehumanize them, to go, “Oh, they’re just… they’re wrong about this.” And frankly, I feel, for me, the spaces that are about convincing people, persuading people, being right while others are wrong, if they ever had it, they’ve lost their traction.

I feel that people leave those spaces feeling exhausted, depleted, and frankly, very rarely having convinced anybody that they’re right, just having proclaimed why they think they’re right and someone else proclaims why they think they’re right, but they haven’t gotten any closer together. And I think we need other ways of connecting with each other, and that’s just one small way that I think this happens.

Matt Thompson:

So, moving back over to the lens of senior caregiving, how might The Art of Care help those senior caregivers provide more thoughtful service to the aging community?

there’s so much opportunity for just the connection that comes from taking the time to listen, notice, discover.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah, and I love the lens of your work on this podcast and of that. As I said, this project was not only looking at that lens, but it’s such a fruitful lens, particularly around questions of care. But I think, in general, this work is just basically about a kind of listening that recognizes the fundamental humanity of the other.

And I think so much of what I have experienced and what I’ve also… my research we’ve done on this play and talking to people who… experience of aging can be one of so much loss, of so much isolation, of having had so many things in your life, that now you’re holding alone with the memory of those things or that it’s no longer what is present in the room.

And that there’s so much opportunity for just the connection that comes from taking the time to listen, notice, discover. And the other thing I just have found with In Your Shoes work, which, of course, not all caregiving has this as an element, but I also just think, in general, that intergenerational exchange has never been more important.

That we as a society have tended to discard, cordon off, devalue the older among us, and also, the younger among us in other contexts. And there’s so much opportunity to reclaim the fruits of what real intergenerational exchange, like the inspiration for the older of us that comes from the younger, and going, “Look at how exciting, how much energy, those new ideas, the freshness of that,” and the accumulated wisdom.

But I think there’s so many things working against that right now in terms of how trust operates in the world in the sense of what young people are inheriting, what old people who feel discarded feel about the world. And so, I’m finding that the In Your Shoes work has been, we’ve been working across all kinds of divides; ideological divides, cultural divides, translation.

But the intergenerational one is perhaps, for me, the richest, the most important, because I feel if we can’t get better at that, if younger people can’t get better at understanding what’s going on for older people and vice versa, and we can’t build more trust there, then I think a lot of our work around care, it’s an uphill battle.

Matt Thompson:

Oh, yeah. It’s super funny you mentioned the intergenerational care or intergenerational exchanges being so important because our last podcast was about this actually, our last episode.

And we just discussed how there’s a symbiotic relationship across generations where learning goes both ways. And from this perspective, the same goes with care. Your older loved ones in your family, though you may be providing care to them, but you’re learning so much about yourself as well. And you’re gathering those stories and collecting those things that are turning you into the person you’re becoming.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Exactly.

Matt Thompson:

So, yeah, that really hits. The Art of Care is not a piece of work that begins and ends in the theater. What’s next for The Art of Care? I know you mentioned that there’s a longer term Art of Care initiative.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah.

Matt Thompson:

Can you break down what that might be?

These seven people weren’t chosen because their stories are so unbelievable and exceptional and superhuman, they’re like all of our stories.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah. I think it’s really about… The play, in some ways, for us, I see as a catalyst or a pilot for people who were able to see it or even who may now hear about it or read about it, or whatever, to say, this is the power of people coming together and telling their personal stories, about care that.

These seven people weren’t chosen because their stories are so unbelievable and exceptional and superhuman, they’re like all of our stories. I really believe that if we choose any seven people and listen deeply and intently to the journeys, that they’re going to be extraordinary stories for any seven people.

And so, for me, this initiative is less about showcasing specific stories and more about creating and opening up the space for people of all kinds, and to share these stories. And I think, hopefully, this In Your Shoes methodology and other related approaches, because it’s not one…

We’ve learned, through this process, that there’s a whole set of things that come out of this that feel generative. So, we’ve had some amazing partners on this project already, which range from healthcare facilities and institutions, both at places like Georgetown where I teach, but also in the wider DC community, to other humanities initiatives, Global Health Institute, different kinds of humanitarian spaces.

And I think the hope now is to really build this as a larger initiative that allows people from the general public to get involved, to come share their story, to learn how to facilitate stories, to develop some skills and techniques to take back into their their spaces of work.

This work, for me, is really about being a tuning fork and a listener and trying to follow the path of what’s needed, and not to… So, I feel, in a way, the play was the first ding of, “Here’s this,” and we’ve had this wonderful expanse of response from people saying, “We need this. Can I…”

So, we’re starting to host workshops that are open to the public, that we do at our lab at Georgetown, but we also have a larger global network that includes fellows who are working in humanitarian spaces, in art spaces, in spaces of incarceration, different kinds of spaces where we think these conversations can be generative.

And I think we’re at the beginning, really, of figuring out how this works as a larger initiative. We know the play existed in one way at Mosaic Theater in its professional run, but there’s also ways to bring, within it, our individual stories that can go out and be used.

If we’re doing a one-day workshop in a community, we can bring three of the stories and use them as a catalyst to hear other people’s stories and have those artists engage with care workers and community members to share their stories and develop these techniques.

So, we don’t have a finished template yet, but these are the kinds of conversations we’re having about how this work can hopefully serve, be useful, be healing, be generative. So many people have said, “You know what, these questions have been central to my life, but I’ve never been in a communal space where I’ve actually felt that they’re being celebrated, these stories.”

People [inaudible 00:34:51] and said, “I’ve never spoken aloud about this, but for several years I was the primary caretaker of this person. And it was not something to talk about at work and not something really to talk about in social spaces, but you’ve brought it home here.”

And I feel like… So, we’re trying to listen and notice that this is striking a nerve, and to work with people and learn from people who really are professionals in these spaces to see how the work we’ve been doing maybe can be additive and can partner.

Matt Thompson:

So, The Art of Care is really a living project?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Absolutely.

Matt Thompson:

And this professional one runs-

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

It’s a caravan, I see it as. Get on board. And in order for any good caravan, get on board, but also, tell us what you need on board.

Matt Thompson:

You need to trademark that because that was too good. So, we’ve got these final two questions that we ask all of our guests.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yes.

Matt Thompson:

The first question is, when you were a kid, what did you imagine growing older would be like?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

It’s such a beautiful question. I was an only-child of divorced parents, which, I think… And I was the quintessential, living and growing up in a city. So, I feel I was the archetypal, like, I was old early. In my imaginary life I was… And I now have kids who, also, in different ways, I feel, like the old joke of, they were 40 before they were four.

Matt Thompson:

Right.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

So, in some ways, I was very busy being old. Young, and wanting to be old and imagining myself being old and filling in all the things, even in my, I mentioned sports. My love of sports was projecting forward to pretend that I was a professional announcer and I would announce the games on the radio, and all the imaginary life of that.

And then, something I think a lot about in my work is that, how much… I guess I feel in becoming old really young, or imagining yourself old really young, there’s also something about staying young as you get old and reclaiming aspects, or claiming, or just reminding yourself of aspects of youth and childhood.

And so much of the work we’re doing now, when I talk about this intergenerational work, I think is about finding the young in the old, and the old and the old in the young, recognizing the wisdom in youth, and recognizing the newness and aliveness that’s there every day of someone’s life no matter how old they get.

And I think of that now differently. I lost a lot of people who didn’t live very long, and now, I’m older, much older in some cases than they got to live. And so, you think differently about the span of a life and what old is and what young is.

And I think this work for me, in a lot of ways, is about, I want to celebrate the five-year-old in me as much as the 55-year-old in me.

Matt Thompson:

So, in The Art of Care you’re really honoring your inner child, or beginning a dialogue with that five-year-old in you, which I think is healing in itself. It’s a form of self-care, right?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah, and it’s all connected to the kind of intimacy and vulnerability in a piece like this. We all know the Shakespearean seven-ages-of-man idea. My 87, almost 88-year-old father came in to see the closing of the show, and I dropped him at the airport this morning.

And I had a poignant moment of just watching him with his cane walk back. And you have those moments of, “I will see him again in a few months.” But time gets more complicated of these trips. And I just was thinking about just the cycles of…

I think that, for me, one of the lessons of getting older is how reductive… When we’re young, we just imagine, I think so many of us, just that it’s so easy to dispense with being old because it’s a foreign experience, it’s strange, it’s unknown. We we don’t even fear it. It just seems an irrelevance, and so, we we’re able to put it at such a distance.

And I think part of what we need are these things like the intimacy that comes… When that distance is bridged, we gain so much from seeing… I know this is digressive, but one of the ways we’ve used In Your Shoes is to be asking, in the context of a lot of work we’ve been doing around climate justice and the environment…

And so, we’ve been doing some radically intergenerational work where we’ll have a very elderly person and a child in conversation about what the earth means to them, and then they’re telling each other stories.

So, a kid will literally be playing someone 70 or 80 years older than them telling a story about a lake or a river that they remember sitting on, and then, the 70 or 80-year-old will be playing the seven or 8-year-old talking about a field…

It’s very moving, because of course, there’s something about the earth and the question of its permanence and its vulnerability itself. And I find there’s something, for me, very moving about childhood in age and age in childhood.

Matt Thompson:

I love that so much. So, now that you are an adult and growing older every day, what do you enjoy-

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yes.

Matt Thompson:

… most about this experience?

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah. I think what I enjoy most is… And the paradox of getting older is, I feel I’m learning. We talk about being lifelong learners, but I am learning to notice and appreciate things I took for granted, and some of that is processes like this, which are about slowing down, deep listening, attention, attention to detail in the way a process like this…

So, if this is the process that I have the privilege of facilitating, I also get better at being like some… We had a lot of crises to navigate on this Art of Care production process. I feel 15 or 20 years ago, I might have just been, like, in the fray crisis, I might have contributed to the crisis more.

And my approach, I tried my best anyway, was just to wait it out, listen deeply, nod, think, breathe, be like, “This is just a play ultimately. We’ll all navigate this. Let’s think on it.” And those are skills that, I don’t know, not everybody, I feel it’s a privilege to get to even be to develop those, however that…

Because I see lots of people whose life maybe gets more and more stressful or it shrinks a little bit. And for whatever reason, being an educator, whatever, I feel I’ve been able, on that, I’ve seen myself grow.

And that allows me, for all the things that are sad and hard and all the loss that comes with getting older, people die, people leave you, you miss people, there’s a lot of grieve, there’s a lot of things that… your body breaks down, there’s things that aren’t great.

But I think my capacity to notice and appreciate others and what’s beautiful in the world and what’s worth fighting for, what’s worth living for, has grown. And that feels like a gift to savor and to try to spread.

Matt Thompson:

Oh, yeah. It’s like you’ve got this awareness now that some things aren’t going to be here anymore, and that ephemerality, as you mentioned earlier. And so, yeah, that capacity grows to appreciate things more as they happen.

Also, you’ve been doing this for so many years. You know how to handle so many things, and it’s something that only age and experience can provide you with that. Some things that would have stressed out in your 20s, totally chill now, you know you’ve done this a million times.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Yeah. Certain things, let them roll off your back. If you can figure out what those things… And of course, some days it’s easier than others, and some days you’re better at it than others, but if you can keep your focus on the things, number one, that matter, but also, that you have some ability to impact.

There’s a way that you can spend positively or negatively, but over-consumed with things that you actually don’t have any agency to control how they’re going to work out. And so, if you can sort of focus on, “Well, here’s what I can make a difference in, here’s what I can offer.”

That’s, again, I don’t think there’s… It’s just a little bit of, it’s experience, it’s luck, it’s a lot of things, attunement, the people you surround yourself with, so…

Matt Thompson:

Wow, this has been an amazing conversation. Thank you, again, for-

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Likewise.

Matt Thompson:

Thanks so much for joining me. As always to the crowd, be sure to check out the Alliance’s website, or AgingResearch.org, to stay up to date on all things healthy aging. Thank you for tuning into This is Growing Old. If you want to listen to this episode and past episodes, you can do so on all streaming platforms. And yeah, thank you again.

Dr. Derrick Goldman:

Thank you, again, so much, Matt. It was great talking with you.

To learn about The Art of Care and upcoming workshops, be sure to visit the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics.