Am I getting old?
Do I have enough time to dream?
Kind of wish I’d done that forest ranger thing I thought was cool in 7th grade. Or found out that rocks could be a career when I was in college.
I’ve racked up 5 decades on the planet now, and despite being pretty satisfied with life, these thoughts arrive, uninvited, and make me feel bad, or anxious, or regretful. I’m fairly sure that I’m not the only one, either, because I hear them from other people who are no longer at the beginning of their adult lives.
These thoughts have a note that’s off from my reality. I don’t FEEL old, and this brings me to a curious question: what is old? Is it the count of years? Is it an attitude? Is it being physically frail?
I’ve come to think of this “old” concept as a simply an invention of our culture, and the media. After all, we are a “youth oriented” culture (just ask an advertising professional). Of course there are other stories that are also invented by culture to educate or indoctrinate. Those are called myths. What if this “old” concept is another myth?
Let’s look at the measurements around “old.” First, there’s the count, right? How many years have you lived through is how the government and restaurants count whether you’re eligible for discount cards and retirement checks. That works, but does it define old? If we take away the judgment, it’s a reward, like a rebate for paying full price for a certain amount of time.
Ahh, time. Time is an invention of culture, too. It’s a functional tool to determine when something happened, to prevent arguments between the uncles over whether little Ritchie was born before or after Danny bought the house. We created dates and measured the cycles of time. But life is a circle, of birth and death, of creation and destruction. The measurement, the counting, gives it the weight that goes along with this myth of “old.”
If you can’t run a marathon or do 50 pushups, is it because you’ve watched the earth revolve around the sun 50 times? I bring that up, because we are seeing more individuals full of live at that significance laden number of 60 years do stuff most of us couldn’t do when we had only counted 20 summers. So, maybe physical ability (or lack of it) doesn’t have much to do with the concept of “old.” Football players don’t retire in their mid-30’s because they can’t do push ups, it’s because of the repeated damage. Point of fact, if I ran my car into a tree a few hundred times every fall, it wouldn’t work very well, either.
The physical frailty question is a little trickier, because there seems to be a direct correlation between people getting sick when they are old. Yes. But it’s not a given. There are many vital healthy individuals who have been around a long time, and there are many very sick individuals who haven’t. I’m not buying the inevitability of “getting old, sick and dying.” My body definitely works differently than it did before. But it’s been a bit of an opportunity, to also keep learning to do things differently. The accumulated bumps and bruises sometimes ache in the morning, and the plate in my ankle tells me when it rains or is really cold. But my body still heals, and my eyesight hasn’t changed since it settled into severe nearsightedness when I was 13. The body changes, all the time, and sometimes it’s to a more comfortable place. In my lifetime, my body changed at 21 to a state of hayfever. I never had it before, and I thought I had a cold for six weeks until I went to the doctor. That was followed by a period of over 15 rotations of the planet around the sun (yeah, years is a more efficient term), when I could tell when the ragweed came out in August by the state of my misery. Another few years and it went away. Completely. I did some things, and it might have helped (local honey was one thing I tried), but I currently have no need of allergy medications.
I don’t believe in getting old, and I reject the thoughts about running out of time when they come up. My practices of t’ai chi and other martial arts give me tools that allow me to be aware of the changes in my body, and the mental discipline to decide how to modify my movements to accommodate. I live to learn and the circle of the seasons is a never ending promise of a new tomorrow, a new season, a new adventure.
I do believe in the circle and purpose of life. When we are done with our purpose, we leave. While we are here, let’s make the most of it, and not blame our lack of trying on the number of sunrises.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
― Mahatma Gandhi
Do I have enough time to dream?
Kind of wish I’d done that forest ranger thing I thought was cool in 7th grade. Or found out that rocks could be a career when I was in college.
I’ve racked up 5 decades on the planet now, and despite being pretty satisfied with life, these thoughts arrive, uninvited, and make me feel bad, or anxious, or regretful. I’m fairly sure that I’m not the only one, either, because I hear them from other people who are no longer at the beginning of their adult lives.
These thoughts have a note that’s off from my reality. I don’t FEEL old, and this brings me to a curious question: what is old? Is it the count of years? Is it an attitude? Is it being physically frail?
I’ve come to think of this “old” concept as a simply an invention of our culture, and the media. After all, we are a “youth oriented” culture (just ask an advertising professional). Of course there are other stories that are also invented by culture to educate or indoctrinate. Those are called myths. What if this “old” concept is another myth?
Let’s look at the measurements around “old.” First, there’s the count, right? How many years have you lived through is how the government and restaurants count whether you’re eligible for discount cards and retirement checks. That works, but does it define old? If we take away the judgment, it’s a reward, like a rebate for paying full price for a certain amount of time.
Ahh, time. Time is an invention of culture, too. It’s a functional tool to determine when something happened, to prevent arguments between the uncles over whether little Ritchie was born before or after Danny bought the house. We created dates and measured the cycles of time. But life is a circle, of birth and death, of creation and destruction. The measurement, the counting, gives it the weight that goes along with this myth of “old.”
If you can’t run a marathon or do 50 pushups, is it because you’ve watched the earth revolve around the sun 50 times? I bring that up, because we are seeing more individuals full of live at that significance laden number of 60 years do stuff most of us couldn’t do when we had only counted 20 summers. So, maybe physical ability (or lack of it) doesn’t have much to do with the concept of “old.” Football players don’t retire in their mid-30’s because they can’t do push ups, it’s because of the repeated damage. Point of fact, if I ran my car into a tree a few hundred times every fall, it wouldn’t work very well, either.
The physical frailty question is a little trickier, because there seems to be a direct correlation between people getting sick when they are old. Yes. But it’s not a given. There are many vital healthy individuals who have been around a long time, and there are many very sick individuals who haven’t. I’m not buying the inevitability of “getting old, sick and dying.” My body definitely works differently than it did before. But it’s been a bit of an opportunity, to also keep learning to do things differently. The accumulated bumps and bruises sometimes ache in the morning, and the plate in my ankle tells me when it rains or is really cold. But my body still heals, and my eyesight hasn’t changed since it settled into severe nearsightedness when I was 13. The body changes, all the time, and sometimes it’s to a more comfortable place. In my lifetime, my body changed at 21 to a state of hayfever. I never had it before, and I thought I had a cold for six weeks until I went to the doctor. That was followed by a period of over 15 rotations of the planet around the sun (yeah, years is a more efficient term), when I could tell when the ragweed came out in August by the state of my misery. Another few years and it went away. Completely. I did some things, and it might have helped (local honey was one thing I tried), but I currently have no need of allergy medications.
I don’t believe in getting old, and I reject the thoughts about running out of time when they come up. My practices of t’ai chi and other martial arts give me tools that allow me to be aware of the changes in my body, and the mental discipline to decide how to modify my movements to accommodate. I live to learn and the circle of the seasons is a never ending promise of a new tomorrow, a new season, a new adventure.
I do believe in the circle and purpose of life. When we are done with our purpose, we leave. While we are here, let’s make the most of it, and not blame our lack of trying on the number of sunrises.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
― Mahatma Gandhi
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