GROWING OLDER

We all grow older. That is a given in this life. What the life to come is like, no one knows for sure, nor does it matter. The only life we have any control over and the only life we need be concerned about, truthfully, is this life. The life to come is out of our hands even though we think we are somehow in some control over it. We really do not even as much as some preachers would like us to believe we do. It is all in God’s loving and forgiving hands – all of it.

As we grow older in this life, we experience good and bad, happiness and sorrow, health and sickness, strength and frailty and everything in between. There is more good than bad, more health than sickness, more strength than weakness in our lives to be sure even though when we are going through the down and hard times, we often think we are more cursed than blessed. But that is human nature thinking and not reality.

Edith Wharton wrote this as she contemplated her own growing older: “In spite of illness, in spite of even the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things and happy in small ones.” What Wharton says is true, however, no matter how old or even how young one is.

Sorrow, our arch enemy, can stifle any growth because it allows us to wallow in the bad, the pain, the suffering rather than dealing with it, working through it and allowing us to move on. It is often easier to let sorrow control us rather than to deal with that which is causing us to grieve at that moment in time. How we deal with that which brings us sorrow will determine whether we move on in life or not.

None of this is to deny that we are sorrowful or that we should not be so. It is a human emotion that is a reaction to pain and suffering, to loss, whatever that loss may be – physical, emotional, relational. If we did not grieve the loss, we would not be human. It is how we deal with the loss, just as how we deal with growing older that is what is important and what allows us to be alive and even grow.

Wharton’s way of not only coping with aging, illness, sorrow and the like is certainly medicinal. But like every kind of medicine, if we do not take it, nothing will happen and we will not get better, or at least not deal with that which is causing pain and sorrow in our lives. And the most difficult pill to swallow, if you will, is that of change, whatever the change: the disintegrating body, the move to another residence, retirement and loss of identity: the list can be and is long. “Be not afraid of change” is easier to say than to do, as we all know no matter how old or how young we are.

Keeping the mind active, alive and alert is, of course, a no-brainer even as it entails using the brain which truly craves stimulation. Keeping the brain cells active, being happy with little pleasures takes thought and effort. When we reflect back upon our lives, whenever we have engaged in such, we have always felt better. Remembering that truth and acting upon it makes growing older easier and even, believe it or not, pleasurable.