As I approach a new mathematical milestone in a few weeks, I have been reviewing the life that I have lived so far; the ups and downs, gains and losses, triumphs and failures, happiness and sadness.  As expected of an average septuagenarian, there were many of the above however, the overall feeling is that I could have done more, better, quicker, and reached higher/further.  I suppose this hubris is also common for this age, but the reality is that we achieve what we are capable of, no more, no less.

As you come to terms with the fact that you are unlikely to reach higher goals, people around you, especially those who are younger than you bombard you with sympathy, faux encouragements and patronising assurances that all is well.  Of course, they all mean well but, these cheering efforts make no difference to your reality on the ground.

“You are as old as you feel”; “you look 10 years younger than your real age”; and “You are amazing to maintain your humour/strength/sharp mind/etc.”.  All these cliches, genuinely meant or not, irritate the hell out of me.  I have enough mirrors around me and none of them suggest I look younger than my years, since the person I see in the mirror suggests I have been boozing, smoking and shooting drugs for fifty years.  As for maintaining my humour/strength/mental faculties or whatever, what nonsense!  If you are younger than me, let me explain a few things to you.

Firstly, not a single day goes by without a physical impairment gets in the way of your attempt at deluding yourself that you can still do what you did 40, 30, 20 or even 10 years earlier.  Opening a jam jar requires Herculean efforts to the extent that you curse the manufacturer for spot-welding the lid to the jar and you don’t fancy jam on your toast after all.  Climbing one step on a ladder demands the courage of someone who is about to scale the Eiffel Tower, without the aid of a safety harness. Getting down on the floor to search for that pencil that rolled under the bed is difficult enough but getting up again needs time and physical effort where your method of standing upright again is neither elegant nor dignified as your arms and legs flail about, much like a tortoise that finds itself on its back.  You lose hair where you used to have it and it starts to grow in the wrong places, thus exaggerating your ageing process.  Your body parts that are not supported by your skeleton suddenly begin to apply Newton’s  Law of Gravitation and sag in the most unattractive manner; even urination requires psychological aid like running water and total concentration on your part for the waste to trickle at a rate slower than a leaking water tap.

The die-hard cheerers around you persist and say things like “the lines and crags in your face give you character and an air of wisdom”.  In that case, can we swap character, wisdom and flaccidity for good looks, taut skin and total foolishness?  They still come back with another line “see, you still have your sense of humour!”  I give up and shuffle away looking for the nearest chair to slump in.

Someone once said: “youth is wasted on the young and old age is wasted on the elderly”.  When you are young, strong, virile with much energy, you invest all these resources on the wrong things.  When you are old and supposedly ‘wise’, you no longer have the energy or inclination to use the time left for you on this earth to make use of your time and wisdom.  The irony here is that we senior citizens, cling on to life for all its worth by walking, dieting, medicating and so on, in order to prolong our lives, only to find that we have absolutely no idea how to fill this extra time we gain, except to stretch it a little longer.

The English poet Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) wrote a poem on this subject called ‘Growing Old’

What is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

The luster of the eye?

Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?

—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—

Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?

Is it to feel each limb

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not

Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be!

’Tis not to have our life

Mellowed and softened as with sunset glow,

A golden day’s decline.

’Tis not to see the world

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,

And heart profoundly stirred;

And weep, and feel the fullness of the past,

The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days

And not once feel that we were ever young;

It is to add, immured

In the hot prison of the present, month

To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.

Deep in our hidden heart

Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—

When we are frozen up within, and quite

The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

Which blamed the living man.

 

You may have concluded from the above that I am not enjoying old age.  This is partly true.  After all, the title of this piece is ‘The Joys of Growing Old’.  So, I am going to skip to the cheery part and tell you about the ‘joy’ element.

I derive joy out of listening to birds singing at the crack of dawn.  I especially love watching swallows ostentatiously flying at an amazing speed with incredible manoeuvrability.  When the sun comes out, I suddenly have an extra few Joules of energy to come out and soak up some vitamin D.  I love the look of a well-kept garden with its riot of colours and scents from the roses to the freshly cut grass.  I love the sound of music and reading of poetry, two creative skills I personally lack but appreciate.

I also like the idea that I am given licence to be eccentric, to have selective hearing; to pretend that I know the name of an author, song, film etc., but unable to recall it when asked; to wear my trousers so high up that the belt is within touching distance of the nipples; to repeat myself and my old stories, expecting people around me to be amused, impressed and enlightened; to go to bed early and wake up at 2:00 in the morning because I can; to boast about the good times in the distant past that I expect credit for when I just happen to have lived them.

Grandson: look at the magnificent ocean Grandpa, isn’t it amazing?

Grandfather: Ah, you should have seen it in my days, son!

I enjoy the company of a handful of people who know me well enough and accept me for what I am and I them.  Although I like my own company and happy to lose myself in my own private thoughts, I still like the daily and regular interaction with Claire.  I love writing the random stuff I subject you to every few weeks and getting your feedback.  Finally, I now fully embrace my role as a grandfather to three adorable children whose every inch of progress from taking the first faltering steps to reading books I celebrate and derive vicarious pleasure out of such milestones, as though I am reminded of my own ancient childhood.

So, on balance, which do I prefer, to be young, strong and a foolish dreamer or old and content?  What do you think?

 

Happy Eid to you all.