Age. It’s a cruel mistress.
We endlessly scramble through the wonder years, with our eye on a prize … career success, love, marriage, children, house, car, holidays, dreams. We don’t take a minute to stop and smell the coffee, don’t enjoy the sunsets or sunrises as much as we should, we burden ourselves with bills & people who don’t matter, talking about stuff that makes little difference, striving, yearning, reaching for … something else, something different, something exciting, something new. The next best thing. The ultimate high.
And then suddenly you turn around and the person looking back at you in the mirror only looks vaguely familiar, and you can see new frown lines, is that a freckle or an age spot? And suddenly everyone you work with looks (& acts) 12, and everyone in the world looks 12, and you can’t really remember how it feels to be 12.
And suddenly your body starts to let you down, and it doesn’t work as well as it used to, and even though you’re probably fitter than you were in your youth, it takes longer to stand up, and your skin doesn’t seem to fit your body anymore and you crease way easier than you ever did.
Nobody tells you.
There’s no manual for getting old.
Because as soon as you reach a certain age, you’re suddenly expected to be quiet and to not have opinions, and to be outdated in terms of knowledge and technology and if you’re a woman, especially, you have to wear certain things and not be too obvious, or too knowledgeable, and you might need to just use extra anti-wrinkle cream to try to hide how old you are.
And people start to treat you differently. They say things like ‘oh, I wasn’t born then.’ And when you try to explain how lucky they are that things are so much easier now, they kind of look at you like you have two very ancient heads!
What a cruel mistress.
There’s no handbook, no advice and guidance, only SAGA on tap to help you navigate your way to the slow moving cruise ship with your zimmer frame.
When your future is shorter than your past, and you’re slipping into the autumn of your life, there really is no roadmap for you.
The worst of it? Suddenly your friends are getting sick, you turn around and suddenly your parents are shadows of themselves, everyone is worrying about blood pressure, and heart flutters and joints are giving up forcing you to curtail your hobbies and activities. Maybe you think about reaching for a jigsaw. You’ll definitely become the proud owner of a pill box.
You look at photographs and people are starting to disappear. People are passing on. Life starts to change as you start to think about your own passing, how short life seems, how much time you wasted on things that, in a few years, just won’t matter – worse still, you wonder if any of it ever mattered?
People start to get forgetful, you feel like you need to cut up your mum’s food when you take her to dinner, your friend tells you she would have only three months to live if her veins weren’t being pumped full of noxious substances that, perversely, is making her feel terribly sick, people start to actually die and then you worry that every ache & pain is something more serious. You become a carer to someone who was once a lover.
All the things we never cared about, now we care so much it hurts. Because now we can see the final hurdle. We see it in the eyes of the generation just up from us. And we know we’re next in line. We know we’re not that far behind now.
And then you wonder if the life you lived was meaningful and worthwhile, and whether you ever contributed anything to anyone, whether you made any difference to anything at all. Whether you gave all those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years the effort they deserved.
Did you stop to think that one day it would all be fading away until there was nothing?
That one day you wouldn’t recognise yourself in the mirror, and that the old young you was trapped somewhere deep inside with no means of escape, struggling to get out, be heard, be listened to, be loved for the person you really are, be honoured and respected for the wisdom you gained, the efforts you made, the work you toiled away at, the goals you chased and chased and chased until you were breathless and windswept.
Because back then, you weren’t an old relic on the way out, you were the new kid on the block with an entire future to look forward to!
We have to decide then when to put ourselves out to pasture, to downsize, to stop working with all the 12 year olds, to buy the elasticated waist trousers and the comfortable shoes.
And you’ll sit with your faded memories vaguely recalling how things used to be. How much better things used to be? And you’ll watch old movies and eat things that remind you of your youth and you’ll remark on how much smaller things seem nowadays and how the world seems to have gone mad.
Then you might sit in the garden suddenly noticing everything and you’ll find true meaning in the logical and human cycle of birth to death and all the stuff that’s crammed in the middle and you’ll feel safe in the knowledge that it will all still be here long after you’re gone.
And that’s why they say it, isn’t it?
Rest In Peace.
Mags Winthrop Blog 