Age is a State of Mind

Age is a state of mind. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. If you care, you’re screwed.

I’m always amused by those soothsayers who’ve decided that since their parents lived long lives, somehow, they’re entitled to the same shot at longevity. Genetics and heredity aside, it doesn’t work that way. It’s a life journey we’re all on and no one has a ticket punched ‘eternity.’

My Mother lived a relatively healthy life until around age ninety then endured several years of gradual decline until her death at age 92. My Father died at age 46 of coronary thrombosis, a heart attack. So which parent will I follow? I’m just days away from 82 so I guess I should be aiming for the nineties like my mother. Oh, if it were only that easy.

One of the newest trends (read hot topic scams) is the hunt for longevity. Every day it seems there’s a new breakthrough on the road to Valhalla.

Too often the commercial focus on longevity gets it all wrong. Living well into old age is not a goal to strive for if good health and mental acuity isn’t present. Without a body that can move around somewhat agile and a mind still curious about life, living into old age is simply an exercise in cheating death for the moment.

Robert Reich (former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration) has an interesting piece on aging online. His synopsis on aging had some interesting observations. ‘In 1900, gerontologists considered ‘old’ to be 47. Today, you are considered ‘youngest-old’ at 65, ‘middle-old’ at 75, and at age 85, you are a member of the ‘oldest-old.’ Elderly friend once told Robert there were four ages to life: youth, middle age, old age, and ‘you look great.’

I have a friend, a former doctor, who reads the obituary pages religiously. I asked if he was looking for former patients. ‘Not ready,’ he answered, ‘I’m more curious how long they lasted and what brought them down. Maybe, I suggested, the banner page should read: ‘Older than Me’ or ‘Younger Than Me’ to refocus his real interest in the subject matter at hand.

There seems to be a new topic of conversation with some folks I know. Robert Reich calls it the ‘organ recital.’ The conversation almost inevitably turns to: how’s your back? knees? heart? hip? shoulder? eyesight? hearing? prostate? hemorrhoids? digestion? and the list can go on and on.

I’ve been extremely lucky in that I still have all my original body parts. After 47 years of running including three marathons, several attempted long-distance runs (over 50 miles) and countless trail runs, my joints, limbs, and extremities all seem to still be in reasonable working order. Whether that’s because of genetics or the support of walking sticks and knee braces on long hikes, I’m still going slow and easy and long.

One philosophy I try to adhere to religiously is the theme of keeping one’s mind active and body moving. There’s no time limit on one’s curiosity or one’s ability to find wonder in the little things around us. As we age, a lot of those things that mattered before like pop entertainment, political clowns and the weather lose a lot of their luster in the dawn of another brand-new day.

As I’ve repeatedly told friends, I have never looked forward to my afternoon at the gym but I’ve always felt one hundred percent better having completed my routines there. So, in a word, the secret is to keep moving; mentally and physically. The grim reaper may be coming around the corner but I’m going to give him/her one hell of a run for their effort to catch me.

Possible Side Effects

Seventeen hours in the ER (emergency room) gives a person plenty of time to reflect on a life lived. For some, it’s a reckoning they don’t want to face. For others, it’s a confirmation that, thus far, they’ve avoided the cruelties of careless living. For me, it was an opportunity to listen carefully (with no apologies, I might add) and reflect on how others had lived their lives up until their collision with reality.

Quick backstory here; my friend had contracted shingles in her eye. Even with the Shingles shot and the booster, she was one of the unlucky four percent that caught the virus. It was incredibly painful. I was there as her caregiver, confidant, listener, sounding board and doctor translator.

Sequestered behind half curtains, her in the hospital bed, me in a chair beside her, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversations between nurse and patient all around us. This was a regional trauma center at a major hospital, so it was busy twenty-four seven. As the patients came and went out of their neighboring cubicles, their dialogue gave me pause and plenty of time for reflection.

The phrase ‘side effects’ glued itself inside my brain. It came from a sign on the wall, prominently displaying possible side effects of some medicines administered. Here came one patient after another, each asked to review their medical history to the nurse then doctor. For most of the patients, it was an open admission of poor judgment, unhealthy habits, unforeseen circumstances, and a hundred thousand other excuses for not living a healthy life.

The first was fifty-five years old skeleton of a woman. She had had most of her major external body parts replaced, removed, or switched out for titanium. Her voice sounded like she was pushing one hundred and her body wasn’t that far behind. She knew a lot of the nurses there and they shook their heads when they saw her name on the roster again.

A middle-aged man came in, about as strong and robust looking, as any other man seen in the ward. Chest pains brought him in with a history of heart attacks in the family. After a litany of questions, the nurse hit the jackpot. ‘Yes,’ he did drink a lot. Only hard liquor and every day. Might this be the cause of his heart issues. He didn’t know but he sure as hell wasn’t about to stop drinking, he announced. End of that conversation.

Another relic of better times had started smoking at ten years old, continued for the next fifty years but then went cold-turkey and turned to drinking instead. Now her kidneys were shot (or so she was told) was probably diabetic (she didn’t want to get tested), was on her third husband and didn’t know where he was anyway.

Moving my friend and I from the ER to a hospital bed took me away from evesdropping but not observing. Each day, the nurses would take their patients on walks around the front desk. Some were recovering from surgery, others from heart attacks and still others from some debilitating illness that had brought them there in the first place. Each was on the road to recovery, some on the high road, others the low road.

For some, age was the culprit but for others, it was simply life catching up with them. For me and all of them, the dye has pretty much been cast. Healthy living may extend the inevitable for a little longer while unhealthy living is most certain to curtail it one way or another.

Side effects in life are like choices made, decisions confirmed and lifestyle avenues taken or not taken. The curtain is dropping for all of us. For some, it seems to be dropping a lot faster than others.

My friend has pretty much recovered. It was a long and tedious process with plenty of Tylenol to ease her painful journey to recovery. They say that once you’ve had the Shingles, you’re more susceptible to a relapse. Hope it doesn’t happen again. But if it does, I’ll be there to help her along that journey again.

Definitely a side effect of love and affection still rock solid after all these years.

The Problem with Old People

The problem with old people is….me! It’s really as simple as that. It’s taken me a long time to figure that one out. As I was growing up, without the benefit of a nuclear family or loving grandparents, old people to me were always furrowed eyebrows, ‘don’t touch that’ comments and ‘you wouldn’t understand’ statements. The absence of a concerned teacher, aunt, uncle or relative didn’t help dissuade me from that conclusion.

The ‘older generation made it very clear to us that ‘children should be seen and not heard.’ The good nuns in grade school and Christian Brothers in high school didn’t do much to dispel that notion of youthful inadequacies. It wasn’t until my ‘Lost Years’ (ten years between high school and marriage) that I was able to finally break free of that older generation’s antiquated, moldy take on life.

Reflecting back, I can see now that those closeted champions of the church, my teachers in school, the boss at work, and even my relatives had pigeon-holed me as naturally as they always had anyone my age. Without the support of adults who cared about me, I was exposed to that generational slant on the younger set. As I got older and surer of myself, their snarling comments gradually wore thin and were ignored.

So, when that old warehouse manager on my Saturday morning side hustle would always greet us college men with: ‘God-damn College kids,’ it just brought a warm glow to my heart and a smile on my face. He hated his life and what our youthful exuberance said to him. His loss, not mine.

I’ve often spoken disparagingly about the ‘old men in the coffee shop.’ These are the retirees, the unemployed and the bored who spend their days rehashing their make-believe youth and bitching about everything around them. Farmers are the absolute worst at this sour take on the world. While we’ve always had ‘salons’ for the intellectual elite, these coffee shop clichés are usually for gossip and complaining alone. From my travels in Europe, I know it’s not just an American thing.

Perhaps my distain for the attitudes of old people is hereditary. My mother used to complain about old folks when she was in her seventies and eighties. Sharon and I never quite got it; thinking instead that once you’ve reached that station in life, you’re supposed to defend your own kind instead of criticizing them. I was wrong. Now I get it.

My mother and my step-father were still dancing and playing cards in their mid-to-late eighties. While other seniors around them were slowing down, they were accelerating their pace of living. Nothing wrong with that. Her distain for others her own age was by no means admirable but it was (in her simple, crude way) understandable.

Reflecting back now on some of my conversations with her, I’m guessing that she simply couldn’t express her feelings that well. She saw no benefit to bitching about one’s aches and pains, or diminishing driving skills or slowness in their gait. She and Erwin (my step-father) were still active and so should other folks their age. I might have been a bit more diplomatic but her point was understood.

I’m at the stage now in life where the passing of my high school classmates is accelerating. But that crucible of old age doesn’t have to pervert our reality with a lot of negativities. I won’t apologize for my mother’s insensitive approach to criticizing her age group nor will I emulate it. Other folks are going to do what they’re going to do. If slowing down and grousing about life is a part of their lives that doesn’t mean it has to be a part of mine.

There’s still much to celebrate with life. Bitching and complaining only gets in the way of that appreciation.

Giving Up the Little Things

It’s like a plague (okay, a bit exaggerated, perhaps) that accompanies old age. A creeping, always justified excuse for slowing down and doing less. A self-congratulatory attitude that says: “I’ve paid my dues and now I’m owed some quiet time.” The self-assured argument that you no longer have to do all those meaningless tasks you were assigned early on in life and have been dutifully fulfilling ever since.

Now, you get to choose what you want to do, feel like doing, and damn it, are going to do or not do. And if you don’t want to do________ (fill in the blank here) then you don’t have to. You’ve earned your right to rest. At least, that’s the mindset that often comes creeping into that tired old brain of yours (or should I say, ours.)

The trouble with this self-fulfilling prophesy is that behind the aforementioned righteous rational lies a fatal flaw that can slowly but most assuredly rob you of the blessings of life. The truth is that it’s the little things that mean a lot, especially later on in life. To eliminate them is only to quicken the pace of an early demise or, at the very least, heighten needless anxiety about ‘the little things.’

I’ve seen it happen over and over again; with my parent’s, other friend’s parents and now (under the glow of my twilight years) some folks around me. It’s never seen as giving up. But rather, an embracing of doing less and not replacing that vacuum with something else worthwhile. Cutting back and emptying that repository of memories and not replacing it with anything new.

So, slowly but surely, the exercising slows down and finally stops. Travel becomes too clogged with uncertainty, driving at night is uncomfortable and our ‘own bed’ takes on a new importance. Our old familiar workplace has changed so much we don’t recognize it from when we first started in the business. Politics remains the same and we stop listening to the facts presented and only focus on the style of dress and how ‘believable’ our favorite candidate seems. If we still care at all.

All those morsels in our lives that made it a comfortable pattern of behavior are gradually lost or let go. Now we have more and more of less and less in our lives. The problem with this new scenario is that the vacuum never remains empty. Instead, it is filled with doubt and confusion and uncertainty of the new, ever evolving world all around us.

I can pin-point almost to the year when my friend’s parents stop living in the present. Their eldest was going off to college in the big city and they knew in their heart of hearts that their future was not going to be a repeat of their past.

It was going to be a different world (as seen through their children’s eyes) and they consciously or subconsciously decided to remain in ‘their’ own little world which is what they did. Gradually as the world changed around them, it became harder and harder for them to recognize the old from the new. Their world was becoming less and less like that of their kids. They found it harder and harder to relate to their children’s cares and concerns. The little, inconsequential things, took on new meaning and importance. Their kids urged them to ‘get out of the house’ and into the real world but they refused.

They’d become captives within their own self-made capsule of existence. Unfortunately, along with this isolation came confusion and concern about the myriads of changes all around them. Nothing seemed like it had been before. They felt lost and confused and thus clung to the old familiar at the expense of the new and present.

It’s a trap that’s easy to fall into without a conscious effort to stay informed, updated and involved with ‘skin in the game.’ Not an easy task but one that is critical to living a fulfilling life.

As mentioned so often before, at this stage of the game, ‘health is wealth.’ The secret sauce of staying alive and conscious to the world around us is to stay active in mind and body alike. The options and opportunities are endless and each one of them paves the way for a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

We only get one chance at this journey through life, why not live it to the fullest and take a break afterwards in eternity.

Zen Habits

What do you want to do with the rest of your life and is Eighty too late to start? Two questions with no concrete answers for either one unless you’ve really got it all together which few of us ever do. What I am sure of is that I’d rather be happy at the miles traveled rather than look back at the stumbles along the way. It took me a lifetime to get here. No shortcuts allowed along the way. So, I might as well enjoy the time still left on the clock.

What’s working in my favor is my German Catholic upbringing. There was always a focus on hard work, material sacrifice and a subtle but unmistakable desire to get ahead. Past generations would often describe it (and usually disparagingly) as ‘rising above your raisin.’ My mother led by example; not words or lectures. It was a subtle message but well received by my sister and I.

Unfortunately, what’s working against me is my German Catholic upbringing. Too much allegiance to the man dressed in black along with his sisters-in-kind. Their word was sacred and final and all too often wrong in all the right places. Emotions and feelings were a sign of weak-ness and our elders often preached that ‘children should be seen and not heard.’

What I’ve stumbled across in my old age (relatively speaking) is the ability to see my luck (through the fog of daily life) in whom I married, my kids, and my grandkids. If there is a legacy, I guess they’re mine.

I’ve been most fortunate with my health, managing my cerebral curiosity, and how I’ve chosen to live my life on a daily basis. There’s been a real outburst of writing projects over the last several years along with a very real satisfaction with my ‘Coffee and Chat’ sessions.

Those early morning coffee clutch gab sessions provide much more than just doctor talk and exercising intellectual prowess on our part. It’s both male and female companionship in my old age.

All of which leads me to a more recent practice of Zen habits or more clearly stated, getting lost in the woods or wash or berm or mountain top as a precursor for getting lost inside my head.

Alone or with a friend, leaving the comfort of home for the rough, unknown of a mountain trek opens one up for all kinds of cerebral explorations. It all comes down to not knowing what you’ll find and not caring. Just enjoying the serenity and peace and calm of mother nature. And luckily reflecting on a life well-lived.

Transitions in Lieu of Eighty

The Zombies said it right. “It’s the Time of the Season.” That was a Sixties song that captured the subtle yet changing times in one’s life. While that band was just a flash point for a short period of time in my life, their song remains a benchmark for a lot of us. Changing times. Changing attitudes and aptitudes. Changing people. A time for a change.

I realized this inevitable life cycle after an extended period of time away from my Midwestern roots. The old homestead hadn’t changed much during my seven month absence but other clouds of change were swirling around me. It was different this time, not on the surface, but it felt like a vague undercurrent of change was pushing against me instead. For some reason, I could see more clearly now. The aging process was catching up on me.

The yard work came a little bit harder this time. I couldn’t get everything done as quickly as I had in the past. More importantly, I found that I wasn’t willing to go back to the old routines and patterns of agrarian behavior that had served me so well in the past.

This summer, I was determined to be more focused on a myriad of writing projects instead. Each of them were screaming for my attention.

There were several mystery suspense novels that needed more exposure to the reading world. I thought they were good. Now I just needed to get others to read them and hopefully, agree with that assessment.

The isolation of the pandemic had forced me to just keep writing one new play after the other. Now five plays later, I was anxious to get them into workshops and the hands of artistic directors. One, in particular, was a jute box musical which called for an inclusion of nine new songs, not yet written.

My first children’s book ‘Waleed, the skinny hippo’ was being translated into three languages besides English. I hoped that these Swahili, Hmong and Spanish translations would help broaden the potential audience for this tale of self-discovery.  A long awaited goal of mine to create a comic strip based on the lives of my grandchildren was finally taking shape. The projects just kept piling up.

Along with my writing objectives, physical fitness became a priority. Seven months in Palm Springs without a gym to go to had caused my body to go to jelly.

So returning to LA Fitness became the first step on my road to recharging muscle mass and endurance. A more focused attention to my physical health and writing was coupled with a desire to purge old relics of the past. I began to see this summer as a transitional period to the next level. Purging the past became a big part of that transition.

Of course, there were always some capsules of time that I didn’t want to change or disturb. Time spent with the grandchildren. Time spent with friends for our ‘Coffee and Chat’ sessions. Back to trail running, long distance bike rides, more reading time and savoring another Minnesota summer.

It’s not a return to the past but rather a refreshing reflection at all that’s passed before me and welcoming what lies ahead.