How do you know when you’re old? One answer recently came to me: when you feel like you’ve pretty well heard, seen and done it all. Or let’s say, all you’ve needed…
That answer briefly sufficed to me, before being slammed by reality. How so? In one example, you open a good book you previously read and it still feels new to you. Or you look at a tree in the garden, which should be overly familiar, but which again, seem totally fresh on this or that day of the year.
Of course there are many in old age who are afflicted by pains of varied sorts, afflictions which sometimes seem too much to bear anymore. But even while limping, etc., there may still live “the dearest freshness deep down things,” to use an old poet’s words.
Not that those even with minor aches can’t get grumpy about old or older age! Like getting up in the morning, finding one’s back won’t straighten, and only being able to pole oneself in a gingerly way toward the coffee. Sometimes it feels permanent, or at least off-putting … till at other times, it doesn’t!
Later in the day you’re maybe moving better, you’re doing errands, you’re more in the game again. So the physical toll may not invariably be the best gauge of old age, either.
How about losing one’s looks? Well let’s face it: some days you don’t exactly thrill at that mirror in front of you!
But then you clean up, and in some ways, you clean up better than some younger types do. Suddenly that mirror on the wall’s a friend, and suddenly (to quote an inner thought or estimate) “old age looks quite appealing on me today!”
I guess you can already denote the devil’s advocate style pervading this article. So far, I can’t seem to find anything reliable that deems old age an island one reaches and can never exit. More accurately, it hits sometimes, but then at others, it doesn’t. It hurts, then it doesn’t. It rankles, yet it also pleases.
Pleases how? In the sense that it makes a person of seven decades or more revel and bask in simple pleasures, more in some ways than when such a person was spry, limber, and … younger.
So: true old age is when you finally give up? But for many, that kind of defeatism is only a temporary, fleeting thing: i.e., you may indeed throw in the towel at certain points in the day. But then you fortunately pick up your spirits, you’re back to contributing more than you’d previously thought you would or could; and are you, in fact, old at ALL? Is old age but a number? I mean hasn’t that cliché lasted and resonated for good reason?
So I guess that’s the way I see it for most seniors, except for the seriously stricken, hurt, and hampered. I.e., you ARE old, but you AREN’T all at once, paradoxical as that sounds. Bringing to mind the old Sinatra song about still thinking young even when 105!
A New Yorker article I once read about parrying depression also comes to mind here. Ideas proffered there? One was that when depressed, it’s a good move to take a shower and shave (this obviously aimed at men). Or simply to get out of the house, embracing the outdoors (this panacea aimed at everyone).
Which makes me think that you know you’re old when you have to keep warding off old age one way or another. When you need to keep foiling or even cheating it, in order not to feel antiquated. Paradoxical again as that may sound…
That way you get through it (sometimes with shining colors). You learn to value those simple pleasures, and that means right from your morning routines. As seen, you almost preen at times in being a so-called “senior citizen.” You may even consider yourself never better.
Perhaps I should have called this piece “The Virtues of Old Age.” Because there really are virtues and pluses in that swath of life. But ONLY when you keep thinking young, or at least younger! Exactly as Frank once warbled…