Aging Well

If one thing's for sure it's that nothing will endure forever, especially people, if people can be thought of as things, which they surely are. It is only because we are human that we insist upon calling ourselves "beings", but after all, what are beings if not things? I may be a being but I am also a thing and when the coil is shuffled off, I, like you all, will be only a thing to place in a casket and hustled off to the cinerary and duly burned.

All of us want to age well, whatever that means. To the vain, it means looking good right up until the end. To the health conscious it can mean living to become elderly without significant illness and/or pain. To those primarily concerned with the intellect it may mean keeping one's wits about one well into the time when, according to the honcho scientists, one should be little more than a human vegetable.

Aging well will always be important to us only because we must all without exception grow old. Roger Waters put it nicely in verse thus:

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking,

Racing around to come up behind you again.

Sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,

Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.

 I need not remind anyone of man's obsession throughout history with staying forever young, yet the fountain of youth remains merely a dream. The fact is that we are all going to age, and then die. Sad but true. Part of the human condition. Still, some of us age quicker than others. Causative factors include genetics, illness, environment, personal habits and so on. The will to live is stronger in some of us than in others, and equally, the will can have an effect on how well or how badly we age. For those concerned with vanity, modern science offers the plastic surgeon and many products designed to preserve the looks. The health conscious turn to diet and exercise to ward off encroaching debility and some believe that the intellect can be "exercised".

What's the point, though? After all, we will all die sooner or later. Some believe it is better to live fast and die young, while others eke out every living minute by hard and fast rules and regulations guaranteed to help live a longer and well-preserved life. It all comes down to one's personal philosophy concerning aging. Yes, living long may be the best revenge, but how about living well? Who wants to live to be 100 when doing so entails a miserable and painful existence?

My old friend Dave after reading some of my ramblings indicated that I sound like a grumpy old man, and frankly that scares me. Who wants to be observed as a grumpy old man when he is playing his guitar in the band, and growing out his hair for the umteenth time and winking at the young girls in the bank?

Aging well is in the mind as much as it is in the body, and when the day comes that I cease to have an independent life, when I no longer enjoy reading and writing, and listening to and playing music, and winking at pretty young girls, then I'll be old and dread, and ready to be carted off to the cinerary.

Until then, I'll go on being 25.