The vagaries of getting old

A friend wrote how he may be going through "aging panic." Each decade was better than the last but his 50s reversed the upward pattern. Are succeeding decades, if one were lucky enough to live them, going downhill all the way?

My sex drive, always vibrant and strong, is less now in physical action but remains alive and well in the mind and soul. I can't skip and jump as I used to but from a regular walking program at the gym I can walk longer distances. Still I wish I had skipped and ran more when I was younger instead of being what I was: too well behaved, restrained, even inhibited.

People talk about what we gain from getting older in exchange for physical losses. We do gain types of wisdom. It does not hurt as much anymore when we don't get what we want. In fact we often see that what we wanted was not best for us anyway. We find the silver lining that is all over life but we just didn't have eyes to see it. We let go many dreams.

As I watch other people grow old alongside me there are attitudes I don't want to let go. We don't let go all our dreams. We might even invent new ones. In his interview with Charlie Rose, Italian architect, Renzo Piano, spoke of "the pure force of necessity... that gives you force and energy to invent." We have to fight against complacency and defeatism. We need ambition and an indubitable belief in the importance of each action however small that we do take. We can't sit in a small room. We need our exchanges with others. We especially need contact with the young, our younger colleagues, the young people still in high school or even with babes in arms. We need them to remind us of the boundlessness of our perceived future. Their fresh take on life is Genesis-like. "And he saw that it was good." 

I agreed with Freud when he wrote that Eros was not just procreative sex. It is the impulse towards life. We may not any more pursue sexual encounters with as much craft or vengeance but the erotic is the engine of desire and attraction. It is a component of what we deem beautiful or admirable. We don't forgo relationships but we change the relationships we cultivate. No longer tight-fisted with our affections we may even spill some on ourselves.

Let us grow older not so much with dignity as with the youthful insistence that the world belongs to us and we to it. Let us produce and multiply to the very last breath. Let us not go gentle into the night.

Posted via email from Duende Arts