For the Time Being: Reflections on Life and Aging
Facing up to the reality of old age seemed daunting, until I realized what a rich source of reflection lay in the years ahead.
How does it feel to be getting old? What is it like to know that there is more — much more — of the road behind you than in front of you? I started to think about this a lot when I turned 70 last year, and this is what I came up with.
For sure it is a privilege to still be here — that feeling you get when you are one of the last guests at a party, but you know you are welcome to hang around. Your host pours you another drink, and you talk animatedly into the night. Sometimes, though, I feel a vague sense of anti-climax, like that feeling late on Christmas morning now that only a few presents remain unopened under the tree, when only a short time ago there was joyful anticipation of all that giving and receiving still to come. Yet pleasure still awaits in the remaining packages. Mostly, I feel that the rest of my life is like a garden in autumn. The bounteousness of summer is gone for ever, but the leaves cling gloriously to the trees and there is still beauty in the late-flowering plants. Nothing is growing vigorously, but neither is anything dying off just yet. And there are seed heads — those memory boxes of earlier, more abundant, more colourful times. Winter is inevitable. The garden tools will go in the shed and all work will come to a halt. But for now, there is still plenty to do and plenty to enjoy. For the time being all is well.
Facing up to Aging
I find myself using that phrase “for the time being” quite a lot; it feels very apt. I have always been more tomcat than ostrich, looking life in the eye and getting on with it rather than pretending certain things just aren’t happening. So I have no difficulty in saying this: whilst things are pretty good for now — for the time being — my time will soon be up. By that I do not mean, thankfully, that I am terminally ill or even that I feel unwell. I have simply done the maths. The Office for National Statistics (UK) tells me that having made it to 70, I am likely to live to be 88, and that I have a one in four chance of being 94 and a 4.4% chance of hitting 100. (A birthday card from the King! Imagine!) Lies, damn lies and statistics notwithstanding, I could still have 20–24% of my life still to live. If you are reading this in your middle years, you probably think this sounds like a lot, right? Except that the last 20% of my life has gone by in the blink of an eye. And it is likely that some of the remaining years will be lived when there are no more presents under the tree, the wine has run out and the garden is bare.
Lessons from Christopher Robin
As this sobering reality dawns, I think about a comparison that is sometimes made between the first years of life and the last, and I remember that delightful AA Milne poem that begins:
“When I was One,
I had just begun”
And ends, just a few lines later:
“But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever
So I think I’ll be Six now for ever and ever.”
Published in 1927, the year before my father was born, the title poem in the collection “Now We Are Six” has entertained four generations of my own family among countless others. Its universal appeal probably lies in its resonance with the adult as well as the child reader. Christopher Robin is somewhat disdainful of his earlier self: “when I was Two I was nearly new, when I was Three I was hardly me”. The young reader can relate to the thrill of a birthday milestone, and not just because of the material benefits a birthday can bring. Every child longs to be another year older. All children are proud to divulge their age to strangers, and Christopher Robin’s pride grows with his age: “When I was Four I was not much more, when I was Five I was just alive”, building up to the magical age, the age from which he is most likely to remember walking through the Hundred Acre Wood and playing Pooh sticks.
The appeal of this little verse to adult readers lies in a brief moment of nostalgia as they reach into the mists of their own childhood memories to remember the interminable distance between one birthday and the next and to recall that feeling of elation at being one year older, one year less new, one year cleverer. Once we hit our late teens, however, we become all too aware that even as we celebrate one birthday the next one is waiting around the corner to take us by surprise that yet another year has been notched up. A vague sense of unease creeps in at the realisation of never being 20 or 30 again, increasing to incredulity when we find ourselves in the foothills of middle age and beyond that, something approaching alarm at how Time’s winged chariot is hurrying near to pull us on board and whisk us past retirement age and on an unknown trajectory towards oblivion.
Not that I was thinking about oblivion when I read this verse to my kids in my mid-30s (though I was almost certainly yearning for the temporary annihilation of an uninterrupted night’s sleep). I don’t even recall that I perceived hitting 40 as any kind of existential threat. On the contrary, I felt, a little like Christopher Robin, that things were just beginning, or at least that I was on the threshold of new beginnings. I had children, the home of my dreams, and I was picking up my career again after the baby and toddler years. No, it would be another five years before I was blind-sided by the fragility of life, and a quarter of a century beyond that before I would look in the mirror and see the reflection of someone on the brink of her eighth decade.
Reflection on Aging
As I gaze in the mirror at that aging face, I make a decision: not to grow old passively, but to actively seek a deeper knowledge and understanding of what the process entails and to write about it. I am driven by curiosity: what does it feel like to grow old? Can I monitor and describe the process over time, in real time, and what can I learn about myself and aging along the way? What can I learn from my younger self? I am aware too of the need to be consciously reflective about all the information (and misinformation) out there about my generation, age, aging and being downright old. Over a series of articles, I will be using reflective approaches to explore the physical, emotional and cognitive changes that come with age. I will be doing this in real time, as circumstances change, situations unfold. There will be much looking back, too — comparisons between the person I am becoming in old age and the person I believe I used to be, but it will not be an autobiography in the accepted sense. Nor will it be an instruction manual on aging. There is no shortage of information on how to be more supple, more active, more socially engaged, better nourished, better anything you want to be, elsewhere and everywhere. I would like it to be a conversation: an opportunity for interactive reflection. I know that I am not alone in this growing old malarkey, and that I could learn much from the experience of others, and indeed from younger generations taking the longer view. Maybe you are getting long in the tooth yourself, or watching a loved one grow old. Maybe your perceptions of how things used to be are different from mine. Or perhaps you are simply fascinated by the seven stages of man — and woman — not least the ultimate stage. If so, please share your thoughts with me.
In the space of six years children like Christopher Robin grow and develop at a rate unique to their age group: from the new born creature reliant on adults for their very survival, to the school child whose physical, emotional and cognitive development has been so rapid that they already have one foot firmly planted in the independent world of school and external friendships. Notwithstanding puberty, education and professional development, no other period of our life sees such dramatic change. No other, that is, until old age — one foot firmly planted in the grave. The last six years or so of our life can, sadly, turn out to be a tragic reversal of the first six years, with a downturn in physical and cognitive attributes and an increasing dependence on others for daily care. It is the desire of most of us to avoid that scenario, or at least to delay it for as long as possible.
Thankfully I don’t appear to be in any sort of major decline right now. On the contrary, I am in a stage of my life that affords me the luxury of time to explore on a personal level a universal but often neglected pathway. I hope you will accompany me along the way.
