There was the elderly woman enveloped in a heavy woollen coat and tea cosy hat who hobbled slowly out of the building and then hobbled slowly back a few minutes later because she’d forgotten to pick up her stick. And then there was the elderly man who was walking even more slowly along the corridor, being physically supported by another man who was probably his younger brother. There were more, but let’s not make the post too tedious.
The point is that this caused me to muse yet again – and at some length – on the issue of ageing. The two people in question were older than me, but not by very much, and so they represented another reminder of how the tyrant time drags us into one of varying states of decay and dissolution before it throws us, mostly unprepared, into the undiscovered country. That depresses me (for all that people tell me it shouldn’t) and I came to think about how we kid ourselves into ignoring the process.
I look in the mirror every day for one reason or another, and what I see appears no different from what I saw yesterday. The process is too slow to discern it on a daily basis, and so part of our mind remains deluded into thinking that we’re not visibly growing older. We even half imagine that we look the same as we did twenty or more years ago. It’s only when we look at a photograph taken twenty years earlier that we’re forced to accept that we looked very different then.
And so more glumness descended on my blighted brain as I sat there bored, alone, untended, and uncared for (I had a melodramatic moment there) until the epiphany happened. Words came down from on high – whether from an ancestor, some celestial being, or my own higher mind (if I have one), I can’t say, but descend they did. They said:
‘Look at it this way. You’re simply a young man living in an old body. That’s all. So conduct yourself with that assurance in mind and it won’t be so bad.’
And I felt a bit better after that. Not much, but a bit.
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