COMTEMPLATING (older) AGE

By Jim Hickson

“Age is a high price to pay for maturity”.
Tom Stoppard

It’s not like you look (wincing) in the mirror one morning and say to yourself
“Boy I’ve gotten older in the last week.” Aging is usually more insidious. As you read this you are aging. You have no choice. You slowly become an emissary from a vanishing world, in my case a world that included typewriters, camera stores, reference books and bulky phones attached to curly cords.

Our lives are also one of entropy, where randomness, uncertainty and dispersal of energy is a one-way street. Is it pleasing to know that this 2nd law of thermodynamics is a natural process? That the tendency for entropy to increase gives direction to time’s arrow? Not really. We are constantly moving toward more uncertainty and disordered states, regardless of our note taking and list creating. That dynamic is no solice.

This reminds me of a joke I heard recently. An older couple were advised to write down lists of items and chores to help them navigate their days. One evening the wife asked her husband if he could get her a dish of ice cream from the freezer. “And with a little chocolate sauce on it too. And oh, a dab of whipped cream. And I think you should write that down.” “That’s ridiculous,” he huffed. “I can remember that. Ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream.” He disappeared into the kitchen for 20 minutes and returned with a bowl of scrambled eggs. She took the bowl from him and said, “Thank you, but where’s my toast?”

“The older I get the more clearly I remember things
that never happened”.
Mark Twain

Being of the baby boom generation, there’s a plethora of writings and YouTube videos discussing aging. Many of them are true. People don’t come up to you and ask for advice. You’re not a silo of wisdom. Very few people are thinking of you, as you slowly disappear from culture. Or rather modern culture disappears from you. Famous young men and women shown on laptops and TV’s—you’ve never heard of. People spout idioms that leave you baffled. (Of course your idioms leave them perplexed, if not concerned). You might say, “Boy, he went the whole nine yards” and watch a younger face wrinkle their brow in confusion. But come to think of it, you realize that this phrase really never made a lot of sense to you either.

One reaches an age that you just approximate years when speaking to others. You say,
“she’s about my age.” “He’s a few years older than me.” You use terms like “only
mid-60s, mid-70’s, latter 70’s,” or (whoa) “nearly 90.” The statement your college roommate said to you last year still resonates: “You know, 80 doesn’t sound that bad.”

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was.”
Satchell Page

If you really dive deeply into inspirational literature about getting old, you find titles of essays such as “Turning Old Age’s Prison Into a Time of Forgiveness and Gratitude.” The author of this piece, Edward Hayes, vacillates between his analogy of old age and it’s invisibility and unattractiveness (in our modern culture) with a call to welcome difficulty and cultivate gratitude and “golden awareness.” This seems easier to do lying in bed at 7 a.m. than slowly getting up while gritting your teeth, or what’s left of them.

Another essay I read recently by Walter G. Moss is titled “Old Aging As An Heroic Quest.” He writes that the basic needs of older people were a “transcendence in order to rise above declining physical powers.” And that old age requires formidable courage, a “heroic quest.” Disregarding Don Quixote titling at an hourglass, that’s a brave face to put on aging, especially one looking back in the mirror. But as Betty Friedan said, “Do not complain about growing old, it is a privilege denied to many.”

The comedian Jim Gaffigan has some insight. He says, “Aging gracefully implies an acceptance, really the antithesis of Dylan Thomas’ poem, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ Of course Thomas died when he was only 39, so he never knew how inflexible knees can be in your 60’s.”

In the end there’s not much to fight back against. Getting older is just a matter of living long enough. Trying to look and act much younger than you are is futile, if not embarrassing. It is really not that heroic to slow down (as if that was a choice) and smell the flowers, cultivate gratitude, or go on a quest to buy cheddar cheese. Still there are nuggets of wisdom in living each day that way, which may be the best approach.

While some dear friends and relatives have disappeared, we as older survivors are still riding that stream, whose current increases and whose waters disperse us.

To the 33,000 people on earth turning 80 today: Happy Birthday!