"You're slumping again, Dad," says my daughter
Abby. "Yeah, and tilting to
the left too," echoes my son David.
It is their youth redux, when they could win any battle by
joining forces against their common enemy, me. I remember their old tricks and make a valiant attempt to
fend them off: "Well," I
say, "I'm pretty old,
and old people do tend to slump.
Anyhow, it would be nice if you were to mind your own business. I am comfortable in my own skin." I say this as grumpily and peevishly as
possible to accentuate my age (not hard to do).
They are having none of it. "You're not
old," they cry in unison to this octogenarian. "Anyway," says Abby, "Mom made me promise not
to let you become an old man!"
She says this as if she could stop time in its tracks. As if I were in denial, not she.
Don't get me wrong.
I love my children and appreciate their concern for me. Nonetheless, I am reminded of the joke
I heard on TV in the 1960s, told by comedian Sam Levenson (1911-1980)
as he complained about the changing relationship between parents and
children: "When I was a boy
and my father said 'Jump!', I asked 'How high?' Now when my son says 'Jump!', I ask 'How high?' When's my turn?"
Aging is a strange process indeed. Things that seemed quintessentially important decades ago
turn out to have no importance at all.
Activities that were the center of one's life recede into dim
memory. (My doctor once told me of
a long-retired patient who, when asked what he had done in his career, furrowed
his brow and said, "I think I was a dentist.") Soul-disrupting emotions—anger,
impatience, disapproval—become ever so much less intense. Time quickens—I do what I would have
previously considered nothing and find out that a day has passed quite
enjoyably.
(I have a theory about that: As one's metabolism slows, so does one's internal clock
compared to the external world's.
One internal second, long ago synchronized to an external second, now
passes while several external seconds have gone by. To convince you of my point, I only have to ask you to
compare two time spans: how long a summer vacation from school seemed to last when
you were young and how fast summer goes by today.)
There are pluses and minuses in aging. The greatest benefit for me is a sense
of peace: fewer and fewer things rile me, and the equanimity I seek, which I
have frequently mentioned in this blog [1,
2,
3],
comes easier and easier.
Retirement, which for me started 18 years ago, became—after a year or
two of decompression—a blissful way of life in which I can do all those things
that I hadn't time for in "real life," including writing the diary
that is this blog. I can control
my own calendar, scheduling as many or as few items on it as I want, with only
a scattering of "musts" imposed by outside forces.
So far there are blessedly few minuses: more aches when
arising in the morning; slower perambulation; the unseemly effort entailed in
getting up off the floor after I've sat down on it with my younger
grand-daughter; after half a lifetime playing tennis, hanging up my racquet
because slowing reactions have taken the fun out of it. A heightened awareness compared to
younger days that my life after all is not of infinite extent; an almost-detached curiosity
about how fate will contrive to end it.
But these latter thoughts aren't maudlin, as equanimity now rules my
psyche.
So too does Ecclesiastes
now govern my philosophy: "To
every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the
heaven." It is my favorite
book of the Bible, for—although it is usually interpreted as pessimistic—in my
age I see it simply as a wise understanding and acceptance of the natural cycle
of life and the cosmic insignificance of worldly striving. "What
has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and
there is nothing new under the sun."