Being Old Is The Same As Being Young

Except you forget where you put …everything.

I often tell people I’m only old on the outside.

Of course, I know that’s a load of BS.

I’m inching toward 83 and every single thing about me is old. Except two. My hair (fodder for another story) and my desire for life.

But I say I’m only old on the outside because it’s the only way I have of defusing the fear younger people have of aging. It’s the way I let youngsters know that, despite the number of years we live, in a very real way, no matter how old we are, the experience of living never really changes.

My body doesn’t feel as young as it did three years ago much less a dozen or twenty or fifty years ago. Three years ago, I could balance on top of a ladder and reach to the top of everything in my home. I could walk without a cane and fly up a flight of stairs.

That’s what 79 looked like for me. Until a piece of cartilage wedged itself in my kneecap.

No big deal, said my surgeon. So a small surgery fixed my knee but sadly, wonky balance happened.

At seventy-five, I was in great shape and could run up San Francisco’s hills. Now I need a cane to get to the corner bus stop, but I’ll still pass you on the turns.

And I certainly don’t turn heads the way I did in my youth, either. Unless you’re into wrinkly, doddering old babes. But I read and think and cook and navigate my way in the world on my own because as an old song goes, it’s them on the outside what gets the shock.

Same old me on the inside.

I often talk about a conversation I overheard with my toddler daughter when we walked past two women chatting about their age.

One tall, grey-haired woman with regal bearing said, “I can’t believe I just turned 72. I certainly don’t feel that old.”

As a twenty-two-year-old, I couldn’t believe people would even want to live that long. Now, my seventy-ish friends seem young to me.

My sister lived into her nineties before she died. My brother Frank just turned 95 and in a recent conversation, he echoed the sentiments of the woman at the post office. The experience of living is ageless even when your body feels old.

Despite illness, loss, creaky joints, the sad decline we see in the mirror each morning, there is in us, as Albert Camus said, in the midst of winter an invincible summer.

Am I selling a picture of endless youth and happiness as the years pass by?

If you don’t learn to achieve joy or peace in life as you grow old, it won’t magically happen at a designated age. But that doesn’t mean your experience of life changes as you age so that you somehow feel different on your 50th birthday.

If you’re a young but negative, grouchy, self-centered individual with no interest in polishing your rough edges, you’ll end up a wrinkled, arthritic, negative, grouchy octogenarian who looks in the mirror and says, funny, I don’t feel as old as I look.

We age by days, hours, minutes. Not by decades. I think that’s what scares us when we’re in the bloom of youth or at least in some semblance of our prime and pass a wrinkled, aged person struggling to walk or articulate a thought full of embarrassing lapses in memory, grasping for words or repeating themselves.

It’s hard to imagine that specter of the Grim Reaper feeling a zest for life

We think age means we wake up one day and we’re different. Hollowed out and zapped of joy and vigor.

But having both been in my prime and doddered around a bit these last few decades, I can speak with some authority when I say there’s a time and a place.

Just as you would not feed a toothless infant a delicious prime rib steak, however delectable, because it would not be age-appropriate, folks in their declining years may not choose to club it until 4 a.m. or train for a half-marathon at the end of a grueling work week.

But meeting a new friend and exchanging life stories over brunch was just as thrilling last weekend for me as hook ups, romantic and platonic were when enlarging my circle of friends over a Saturday brunch was routine back in the day and not a blessing after years now of Covid isolation and a serendipitous Medium connection.

We assign infirmity to our declining years. I’m the first to admit that when I was younger my joints worked better. I’ve had nine surgeries since entering my sixties, but only had my tonsils removed at age five before that.

But migraine headaches and asthma have plagued me since childhood. I’ve suffered debilitating back pain off and on since my twenties. My parents lost a child when he was five from rheumatic fever. People get sick and injured at any age.

I have an 87-year-old friend who is as fit as most people half her age and she’s not unique. My book group has been meeting on Zoom every Saturday since the pandemic began and you won’t find a smarter, more gifted group of writers, none under seventy. We’ve been together for almost thirty years and they are as sharp as ever. Some have children with more health issues than we have.

Bad things happen to people at every age. So do good things. Even when you’re shuffling around with a walker.

When I first came to Medium I stressed about finding my niche. Time and again, though, I found myself writing an aging-relating article, debunking the notion that age was to be feared.

Now I think I have message more than a genre. Don’t be afraid of life when you have it. If the last two years have taught me anything, it’s that life is fragile. It’s a lesson that gets thrown in my face again and again.

Yesterday, my daughter took me to a favorite upscale restaurant for an early Mother’s Day lunch. Closed during the lockdown, it was a special treat. While waiting for her at the desk, I picked up a copy of their magazine and saw pages of photos taken at celebrity affairs with guests and ads celebrating youth and health and beauty.

With the shadow of Ukraine all around us, I thought, have we learned nothing? I love youth and beauty, too. But in my mind, nothing sells life like a smiling octogenarian swathed in a bounty of friends and family.

What a message that would be: Sure, you could buy our perfume and boink the rich guy at the party, but how about wearing our perfume as you live life to the fullest into your nineties?

Because that’s what I’m doing, but maybe with a cheaper perfume.

Thanks for reading.

Before you go…

And a few articles of mine you might enjoy reading.

I’m a writer and freelance editor Medium with Top Writer status. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon. I edit fiction and non-fiction for private clients. If you’d like to hire me as your editor for fiction, non-fiction, or business writing, please contact me here. If you’d like to read more of my work on Medium, click here to sign up for my newsletter. Thank you for reading, and stay safe.