Age

This week my focus has been on people who have already seen passing many years and who had to come to terms with quite some changes as well as challenges in their lives. Not so long ago the elders were looked up to for their wisdom and for the share that they had in progress. Today they are often pushed away and sometimes treated like imbeciles. In our minds we equal the visible decline of physical power with a loss of mental skills although this isn’t true. Not everybody advanced in years suffers from Alzheimer’s disease like Fiona Anderson in ‘Away from Her’.

There are people who remain very active and alert until the last moment like Daniel Defoe or Susanna Tamaro’s Olga in ‘Follow Your Heart’, but in our glaring and loud world such individuals are almost invisible and inaudible. They are always around us, but we prefer to ignore them because they don’t fit into our society of the young, the good looking and the strong. Success must be achieved early in life. Someone settled isn’t expected to still have the necessary verve and power to bloom and do great things. However, there are occasional late bloomers.

Society still hasn’t internalized that human life, too, is constant evolution. Everybody is always changing. Nobody ever stays the same. We are born, we grow up, we come of age, we grow old, and we die. It’s always the same cycle. Somewhere on the road we are relabelled as old, less productive or even useless although we may still feel young in body and mind. Our internal count of years rarely goes synchronous with the Earth turning around the Sun. Also the inevitable decline of body and brain is very personal with age being only one factor in the process.

In a nutshell: age is nothing but a number and doesn’t decide when or if ever we will be the knitting granny in a rocking chair or the dozing grandpa on the veranda that appears before our inner eyes. We might as well be approaching our real bloom. Isn’t this a nice outlook?