Old Age is a Lot More Exciting than I thought it would Be.

Old age looks so dreary, especially to tired people in their fifties. Is this all there is to look forward? Getting stiff, wrinkled, sick, diminished?

Well, I felt like that at times in my fifties and spent a lot of time in my sixties working hard to avoid ageing.

But ageing happens. It’s non-negotiable.

Now I am rushing towards eighty and with the blessings – and they feel like blessings – of good health and enough money, I find ageing totally fascinating.

So, why?

Well, firstly, we are closer to death. I no longer think this won’t happen to me, or put it in some distant ‘of course, but not now’ place. I live in a retirement village and death happens around me every few weeks. One day it will be my turn and I have no idea when that time will come.

So I appreciate each day in a more vivid way than I ever have, and I have always loved life. I look at colours, flowers, trees in the wind. I sit on benches and watch people. I stand in awe at a helicopter pilot maneuvering a load onto the top of a building. Yes, it is in a way like being a child, but I have some idea of the torque involved in a helicopter which makes my amazement so much richer. Who first thought of a helicopter? What was the process of development? What refinements lie ahead? None of those thoughts were in my mind as a child.

My mind is so rich with memories, associations and interest. On a recent bus ride home I found myself wondering about a new restaurant, noticing the flat space where once a building used to stand and wondering who owned it and why it came down and what was going to happen with the space. Only a minute later I saw a young man get in the bus who looked like someone in Dr Zhivago and I wandered into the movie and thought about Russia over the centuries and what it would be like to live there. This dream was interrupted by a young man carrying a shopping bag full of nappies and I wondered if he and his family are ‘doing it hard’, and what their lives were like.

Now I have so much more experience, the lives of others have become fascinating to me – which is a change from the intense self-absorption of my younger years. I look with fascination at my ageing compatriots. How are they going? What do they find hard? What keeps them up at night? How do they deal with their fears? Who has money and what are the issues to do with lots of money, or not enough? How do they face death? What makes life worth living for them?

And as you edge closer to the end of life, you have the arc of a lifetime to contemplate. Childhood, adolescence, university, first jobs, relationships, work, parenting, separation, more work, more study, travel, adventures, page after page of experiences added into our memories. And time to think about them, to ponder, to more deeply understand. A friend in her 80’s said recently that she had just realized who in her family she really resembled and felt connected to, when she had always felt an outsider. In this contemplation there is still learning.

So time spent under a tree just looking at life, can also be time with an encyclopedia of experience. I can choose to remember, to question, to make connections, to see something anew. Or I can put down the past and just be present to the extraordinariness of being alive.