Some thoughts on aging

 

Me and my big brother.
Both of us aging pretty well. Suppose it's the genes? 

This morning a friend of mine posted in her blog about what some experts are calling the Third Age of life—that period after the kids are grown and gone and retirement has either come or is looming. Men and women are living longer now than they did fifty years ago. The average life span is seventy-four for men and seventy-nine for woman in the United States. That’s up a lot over, say 1950, when it was sixty-eight for men, but the figures dropped during Covid and still have not completely recovered. Still, Americans need to think about their plans for this new Third Age. Instead of seeing it as a time of declining powers, we have to approach those empty years with enthusiasm and a will to fill them with new activities. The Third Age is a time for fulfillment of all that has gone before in an individual life.

That whole concept struck me because it reinforced some things I think—like opportunities for growth in the Third Age. Retired now for twelve years, I have continued to write, although I’m not sure I’d say I’ve done my best writing during this period. Pretty much, I think I approach my life now with enthusiasm and greet each day waiting for the opportunities it will bring. But I also think I’m a mixed bag of thoughts. Some days, when I can’t do something or feel it isn’t working right---all writers have those days!—I think to myself, “It’s okay. You’re eighty-five. Cut yourself some slack.” I suspect that’s not a helpful—or healthy—attitude. I am thinking here of mental rather than actual physical health. Giving myself a pass on a mental or intellectual problem because of my age is not okay—it’s just a way to accelerate aging.

The Third Age is a time of freedom—free, mostly we hope, from the financial strain of raising and educating children, perhaps from the mortgage for a too-big suburban house, from the pressure to succeed. For me, that means I’m free to fall down a lot of rabbit holes—if something irrelevant to anything I’m doing interests me, I can follow up on it. IF I read something about a historical incident I never knew before, I can do some online investigating; if a Ruth Reichl column inspires me, I can look at the historical recipes she references. It’s sort of a will o’ the wisp approach, but ten years ago I’d have scolded myself for wasting time. Not now. Every new fact I learn, every new thing that interests me keeps my brain functioning.

Of course there are some things I cannot do these days that ten years ago I could—walk without assistance, reach things above the first shelf on a kitchen cabinet, twist off some jar and bottle caps, etc. It’s legitimate for me to ask for help on those things because I cannot physically do them—a weird hip replacement and torn rotator cuffs on both shoulders limit me. But I also tend to throw my hands up in the air at the slightest financial problem and refer it to my son before I try to figure it out myself. Not cool. I need to watch daily that I do not let my mind slip into laziness.

I know a lot of the elderly (yes, that’s me) focus on their health. Have you ever listened to old folks chat? Way too much of it is about symptoms and health problems, imagined or real, limitations, and—yes, great sighs over what they cannot do. I have avoided that by going to the other extreme and ignoring minor problems which turned into major ones that I should have paid attention to (why I’m on a walker). I am, to my discredit, the opposite of the little boy who cried “Wolf!” too often. But I do not want to live the last trimester of my life spending my days in one doctor’s office after another. I have a sort of innocent health theory—if certain signs are okay, if my nails and hair are growing and I am regular, I figure my body is functioning, and I can pretty much ignore other small symptoms. Yes, I do all the preventive things—skin check, mammogram, cardiologist once a year, nephrologist once a year, etc. But child of osteopathic medicine that I am, I prefer to think in terms of health rather than illness. On a wellness scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, I would put myself at a seven because that’s the way I feel. My doctor might disagree, but that’s okay.

I think aging, like a lot of other things, depends on that now-hackneyed phrase: positive thinking. If you go into that Third Age with enthusiasm for what you can do rather than regrets about what you can’t, with a determination to be as healthy as the good Lord permits, with joy in the moment rather than regret for the past, the Third Age can be a wonderful experience. In many ways, I am more content now than I have ever been in my life. I’ve known mountain peaks of happiness and passion, valleys of despair, the joy of young children, the satisfaction of professional accomplishment—and now those are all memories I treasure. But they are not the stuff of my daily life. And that’s okay. I’m eighty-five, alive and healthy and involved in life.