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Welcome confusion

I was told to expect confusion as I aged. “You’ll get used to it,” one of my elderly friends assured me when I retired, “You can’t stay on top of things for ever: they’re changing too fast nowadays. And anyway, it’s a young person’s world out there,” he added with a resigned sigh.

Well, perhaps, but at the time I considered myself in an interregnum, a liminal space committed to neither side. But actually, I think I had already normalized the process beyond easy recognition. In fact, I’m finding I’m getting rather good at it now that I have more time to practice.

There is an art to confusion, I think; you can’t just go into it willy-nilly and expect results. Nor, I suspect, should you bathe in it for long periods lest it be mistaken for terminal decline: I hate locked wards. No, confusion well done must be consumed as an aperitif, an appetite stimulant, not the meal itself. It should awaken the palate, not destroy it, galvanize the intellect, not replace it. I also find it best not used in the company of younger people whose experience of it is often laden with hormonal issues not at all relevant to those who dodder.

It seems to me that it may be time for a retrospective on confusion, a reassessment of the maelstrom it has become in sucking away a sense of direction in popular culture. There was a time when we were more tolerant of uncertainty; after all, only in matters of religion could we say we had the answer -okay an answer- but even there things were beginning to fragment. As Socrates was reputed to have taught, confusion -realizing what we did not know- was the first step in reassessing what we did, and a goad to reorganizing our thoughts.

Old people should be good at this actually: the years have winnowed many of the leaves we grew to store our experiences so we now have less, not more, to confuse us. You cannot keep a leaf green forever -in fact, the desire to do so is often the root of confusion: things fall off; the branch withers…

I was walking along the seawall in Vancouver one autumn day when I happened to see a gray-haired elderly man sitting on one of the many benches along the way. It’s a common sight in Stanley Park and I don’t think I would have done more than glance at him had his face not betrayed such a worried expression.

He was neatly dressed in shiny black leather shoes, khaki pants, and wearing a dark brown corduroy jacket over a white cotton shirt buttoned up to the top. A book lay on the bench beside him, its pages ruffling in the wind. But he looked lost, and kept turning his head as if searching for something or someone that he recognized.

I wondered if he might have wandered away from one of the senior’s day-trip buses that occasionally frequent the park on sunny days, so I walked over to him to see if I could help.

“You look worried, sir,” I said with a disarming smile, as I stood by his bench. “Can I help…?”

He looked at me for a moment, evidently confused at my offer, and then shifted on the bench as if he needed to see something on the shore behind me. “You can get out of the way,” he replied.

I shuffled over to the end of the bench, but didn’t leave. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do next. If he were a patient somewhere, I assumed somebody would be searching for him, but I felt guilty simply leaving him there to be found; he really did look bewildered. Still, although I seemed to be bothering him, I decided to sit down at the far end of his bench and try to engage him in conversation.

I stared out at the ocean for a moment, and then as casually as I could manage I asked him if he were from around here.

He looked at me for a moment, with a puzzled expression. “Does anybody actually live here?” he asked, his brow furrowing. “I thought it was a park…”

I smiled. “I meant are you visiting from another city, or do you live in Vancouver?”

“I’m visiting the park; do I look like a tourist?” he said with a scowl.

I couldn’t decide if he was toying with me, so I decided to change tack. “I just live across the Lion’s Gate Bridge, so even I probably look like a tourist to the locals…”

His eyes continued to scan the foreshore as if I were merely an unnecessary distraction. He stood up briefly and stared at something dark bobbing on the waves, and then sat down again. “Seal,” he muttered to himself.

I sensed an opportunity to engage with him. “You’re interested in marine life, I see. Are you connected with the university?”

He fixed me with a perplexed look in his eyes. “Interest in the ocean doesn’t necessitate a PhD, surely…”

Whoa. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, as his eyes were distracted with some people passing by the bench. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything. I was just curious…”

Gradually his expression changed, and a smile snuck onto his face. “You thought I was a disoriented and confused old man who’d wandered away from his keepers.” His eyes twinkled at the thought .

I couldn’t prevent a blush from spreading across my face. “I… I thought you looked lost, so…”

“So you thought you could help.”

I nodded, embarrassed.

“Well, you were partly correct, but you assumed it was me who was lost.” He allowed himself a little sigh. “I suppose it goes with my age -that and the assumption of confusion, eh?” He chuckled at his insight. “Well, I thank you for your concern sir.” He picked up his book, started to get up from the bench, and then stopped and turned to me. “You heading the usual direction around the seawall?”

I nodded.

“Would you care to accompany me for a bit? I could use an extra set of eyes.”

When I looked puzzled, he smiled and shook my hand. “I’m George,” he explained, “and I’ve lost my wife. She wandered off while I was reading; usually, she never gets very far, but she sometimes forgets where she is: with me it’s just while I’m reading, with her it’s… well, it’s becoming most of the time.” He shook his head at the thought that he could have been so careless as to lose himself in a book and not notice that his wife, too, had become lost.

I think confusion takes many forms, and only some of them are pathological… I’m not sure whether we are always sure of the boundaries, though.

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