aging
You are viewing stuff tagged with aging.
You are viewing stuff tagged with aging.
The ex-potato field felt empty but not desolate—lot stakes, light posts, and the bafflingly windy streets of modern suburbia were all in place. Ours was the second house in Brighton’s Landing, a development in what would soon become one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. I knew none of this context, nor would it have refined my picture of my place in the world—like any child, my life was defined by low walls and narrow vistas. But I did know we were moving, here, to this new house. I gazed up into the vaulted entryway, looked down at the unstained ornaments for the front window. My memories of this construction phase are spotty, but I know we visited regularly during dim fall evenings. I remember little from the days we moved, but the vast expanse of fresh carpet lodged in my brain. Perhaps because I was six years old and still close the ground. That was 1991, over 20 years ago.
The sun set a while ago and I’m sitting in the living room with the warm lights and furnace keeping away the unseasonably cool night. “Tied to Me (Acoustic)” by the magnificent William Fitzsimmons is quietly playing on the stereo. The couch is snugly in its new corner in the living room (we recently re-arranged furniture). Rain is gently falling outside, making tiny sounds on the windows. And, I know, this is sounding like a bad beginning to a dull book. But, literally, that’s what is happening right now. Forgive me the pedestrian topic and stunted prose: there’s poetry in everyday life, but I am still trying to capture that in writing.
I leapt over a leg press machine so I could quickly move to another part of the weight room floor.
“How old are you, man?”
A random guy at the gym, one who I’ve talked to only once before, surprised me with his question.
After laughing for a bit to regain my composure, I answered: “I’m 26.” Twenty-six, I thought. That sounds… old. I’m over halfway through my twenties. That was quick.
A quote from poet Jane Hirshfield in David Grubin’s film “The Buddha”, on PBS:
No matter what your circumstances, you will end up losing everything you love, you will end up aging, you will end up ill. And the problem is that we need to figure out a way how to make that all be all right.
You know you’re growing up when you’re much more interested in the decorating and appliance choices made in the kitchens of Facebook pictures than you are in the people in the pictures. Also under development: maturity.
Barbara Strauch, in How to Train the Aging Brain:
Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.
Here’s a man that time forgot… not in a historical sense, but in the sense of doing any actual aging. Abdoulaye Wade is the president of the historically stable but deeply troubled country of Senegal. Look at his picture in that first link. Just look at his picture and then switch back here.
I suppose this could be considered another entry in my ‘happiness’ series, but this comes from a very different angle. I just finished a flat-out fantastic article in the New Yorker called The Way We Age Now, by Atul Gawande. What Dr. Gawande did was summarize the steeply declining geriatric profession and link it to anecdotal evidence for necessary changes in medicine’s attitude towards geriatrics.