Walking With Plato: A Senior Community Field Trip

In her latest essay, Jean proves that a simple walk around her senior community can escalate into a full‑blown philosophical adventure. Armed with a battered copy of Plato’s The Republic, a set of Cliffs Notes that have clearly survived several eras, and the determination of a woman who recently decided that 6,000 steps a day is her new lifestyle, she heads out to improve her mind while her lungs negotiate the terms. Along the way she encounters bullfrogs performing an unsolicited chorus, swans who enjoy posing for photos, and a snapping turtle who behaves as though he owns the property. With her trademark blend of wit, curiosity, and ’80s‑honed academic bravado, Jean draws connections between ancient Greek political drama and the modern spectacle of dog walkers and lake side wildlife. The result is part nature walk, part political commentary, and part reminder that if Plato had lived in a senior community, he’d have had plenty to write about...AI

It was the end of another week and I needed a topic to blog about. In my world of widowhood and independent living in a senior community — in my world of being obsessed with the new hobbies of diet and exercise — you’d think something would jump out. But all I could come up with was Plato’s The Republic.

Why that ancient book? Why now did I grab my battered copy off the shelf — the same one from my second round of college in the ’80s, when I studied philosophy with the kind of intensity only a woman reinventing her life can muster? Maybe it’s because since increasing my daily step count from an average of 2,500 to over 6,000, I’ve been trying to also improve my mind, if not my image. Books and walking seem like a strange pairing, but my walks are broken up by bench‑sitting, which gives my lungs time to catch up with my heart rate, as well as giving me more reading time.

Bench One: with a view of where the bass notes of the bullfrog choir can be heard coming from the cattails. Last week a snapping turtle strutted across the walkway as if he owned the place. I resisted the temptation to pull my feet up on the bench, knowing he as eyeing my toes for dinner. He was at least 18 inches long.

Bench Two: the lake overlook, where I sit with the sun on my face hoping the swans will glide by for a close‑up. If not them, maybe a family of coy will swim past. We have Canadian Geese, Ducks, Great Egrets, and Cranes too — although those last two prefer their privacy on the far side of the lake.

Bench Three: the woods, where I take what the Japanese call a Forest Bath — soaking in oxygen, solitude, and the quiet authority of the trees. I sit long enough for the birds, squirrels, and chipmunks to forget I’m there and resume their business. And I sometimes use my Audubon bird call to try to start a “conversation,” though I’ve only mastered one species despite the device’s promise of a dozen.  

 

Place near the woods where walkers build mini cairns on a large boulder, myself included.

Bench Four: the Grand Central bench, perfect for people‑watching. Dog walkers, resident and neighborhood walkers, anyone coming or going from the underground parking and the main entrances of two building plus the wood shop has to pass by this bench. 

Underground parking (center), to the right is the walking path down to the lake.

Main ID building in the distance, my building to the right. 

The main intersection where the paths to both the lake and woods start. The building houses our wood shop and arts/crafts, with the main road through the campus running in front of building.

Because people often ask what I’m reading, I’ve learned to curate my book choices. No one needs to know I occasionally enjoy trashy stuff. So I pick books that make me look thoughtful, maybe even nerdy: Eats, Shoots & Leaves (my annual punctuation refresher), On Writing by Stephen King (my holy scripture on the craft), and How to Write Funny, which is now unintentionally not so funny because its humor is stuck at the turn of the century.

Last week I started Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises but quit three‑quarters of the way through. I picked it because a recent article in The Atlantic called it the best‑written novel of the twentieth century. I wanted to see what made it so great. But I hated the dribbling, unending dialogues, and I stopped reading just before the bullfighting — which, apparently, is where all the wisdom about the meaning of life is revealed. I put it back on the shelf where I can continue pretending I’m better read than I am. Although guilt at not finishing the book might making me pick it up again.

Which brings me to my current walking companion: Plato’s The Republic — and its Cliffs Notes (the pre‑internet cheat sheet to the classics). Both are heavily underlined in yellow, and the margins of the former are filled with notes in my handwriting. Proof I once understood the text? Or maybe I was writing down what a professor insisted we understand? We'll never know.

What shocked me this time around was a passage noting that 370‑plus years B.C. (when The Republic was written), Greece was fighting wars over who should govern: the Democrats or the Oligarchs. I read that paragraph several times, not liking the parallel to our own era because it could be said we’re living through the same argument now. Why hasn’t mankind settled the question of fairness in governing after so many years? But then, I’m a Democrat. If I worshiped at the altar of money, I might see things differently.

Plato had an answer for why we still fight over who controls governments: simply put, times change but human nature doesn’t. Which also explains why so many stories in the Bible are labeled “prophecy.” Prophecy is easy to understand when you think of human nature as a primal force as predictable as the sun rising and setting. The nature of humans to love or hate, to be greedy or generous, caring or callous — these are constant in all civilizations. Our job is to keep these opposing forces in balance. Whether we call it Dualism, Complementary Opposites, or Yin-Yang forces the universe can't function without polarity in all things.  

And here I am, old enough to be tired of the fight but still stubborn enough to believe we have to keep fighting if we want to leave the world better than we found it.

One of the questions in the back of the Cliffs Notes asks whether Plato’s criticism of oligarchy or democracy applies today. I wrote in the margin: “You’d have to be blind and deaf not to see that same struggle going on in Trump’s America.”  ©

See you next Wednesday.   

 “Whereas the truth is that the State

 in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern 

is always the best and most quietly governed,

 and the State in which they are most eager,

 the worst.”

 

Plato 

 

A fenced-in area on campus for the residences of the Memory Care and Assisted Living.