Gettin' on in years

All photos courtesy of www.flickr.com

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about aging -- about how quickly time goes when you least expect it to fly, about how, when you're young, it seems as if the hands on the face of the clock are stuck, and the time between Christmases and summers is much too long.

When he was in his 80s, Dad told me his philosophy about how the years seem to pass: They way he reckoned it, each decade went by twice as fast as the one the preceded it, so that his 30s seemed to go by 40 times faster than his boyhood did. "Yikes!" I thought. "This can't be good. Better hurry up and get something done. Better not wait for the 'right' time to do what I want."



Of course, sometimes when you're inside that decade, time seems to slow to a crawl, and the days seem endless, but overall, I think Dad got it about right. What seems like yesterday to me can easily be ten, twenty-five or forty years ago. It all sort of blobs together in my mind, and I'm often startled to realize that I'm talking about the "olden days," not yesterday.

And another thing starts to happen: You're not relevant. The world prizes "new" over "wise," "fresh" over "experienced." So just when you start to really get it, to figure out some of the mysteries of life, someone has changed the subject, and you really aren't all that interested in the new topic. You really don't want that new iPhone thing, and you're not even a Luddite. It just seems so inane, so immaterial somehow. You've seen too many fads come and go. Too much waste. Not enough substance.

See, you've got your education, both in school and in life. You've been around the block a few times. You know what makes people tick. You see history repeating itself, and nobody seems to be paying attention. Your pearls of wisdom are ready to be dispensed, but the game has changed while you were going along, gathering up experiences and weighing their consequences, refining your outlook and storing up memories.

Then you realize that your time could be up any day now. You've gotten your AARP card. You get discounts just for being old. You are a grandma or, like George will soon be, a great-grandpa. I mean, Rita has been a great-grandma for years! How is that possible? She's my big sister, not somebody's great-grandma, for heaven't sake!

Then you remember Peck's formula for the passing of time, and you realize that he wasn't exaggerating one bit -- that once again, "Peck was right." And you hope it's not all been about the destination. You hope you've been enjoying the ride.

You change your mind about at what age a person is "old." You weigh the risks and benefits of aging and realize that just living longer is not the purpose of life. While old age completes the cycle and allows you to reap the fields and enjoy the harvest, there's a price to pay for that privilege, just like everything else. You lose people you love, you experience grief, irrelevance, aches and pains and fear of more loss.

You need to get your perspective back, learn not to care that others are playing a different game, spend your time doing what you enjoy -- and learn to give back a lot of what life gave you. You learn, I hope, that getting old is a special kind of privilege.


While it certainly isn't always a picnic, who ever promised that it would be? I'm in for the duration. I hope I don't waste whatever time I have left. I hope I give more, worry less, take my foot off the brake now and then and hold on to my philosophy that everyone's entitled to my opinion, whether they want it or not. I want to live like my daddy did -- and let go when the time comes.