Don’t Call Me Amazing

Because I’m 80 Years Old And I Can Walk Across The Room and Text My Bestie At The Same Time

I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. People call me amazing because I can do a two-minute plank. They tell me I’m an inspiration because I fantasize about sex. They tell me they want to be like me when they grow up because I drop F-bombs with equanimity.

As if those things are exceptional accomplishments for a healthy human being my age. If you call me amazing because I can do any of those things, you sell yourself short and underestimate the power of the elderly.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a nice compliment. I’m enough of a narcissist to like the attention. But calling me amazing because I started doing a fifteen-second plank several months ago, thinking it would kill me by the time the timer went off is like calling a baby amazing because she has taken her first tentative steps. I just increased it by a second or two every few days. In a couple of months, I was up to a minute, then Boom! A month later, two minutes. Physics and physiology at work.

My accomplishment was no more amazing than a child learning to walk, which is the normal process of muscles, nerves, and bones developing to the point where the child is ready to put one foot in front of the other. It’s delightful, sweet, even funny to watch the first awkward steps. Amazing? Not if you understand human growth hormones.

If you exclaim over any person my age doing something rather ordinary, such as exhibiting muscle strength by virtue of exercise, or a bit of wisdom because they’ve paid some attention as they progressed through life, then you are insulting our ability to function as normal human beings.

Climbing Mount Everest is amazing. Raising $23 million for Britain’s National Health Service by walking in your garden at age 99 is amazing. The fundraising, not the walking.

But elderly people using their bodies to do normal things shouldn’t be regarded as exceptional.

But that’s not the real problem here. You can ruffle a senior’s feathers for a bit, but we’ll get over it. We have too many other things to worry about before we shed our mortal coils to fuss about you young people underestimating us.

The real issue is that in the process, you limit your own expectations for yourself.

If you’re surprised, for instance, that Captain Tom Wolfe can walk his hundred steps a day to reach a thousand before his hundredth birthday, you’re unconsciously betting you won’t be able to do that either. Your saying in essence that when you get to a certain age, your body will shut down. Or, more likely, you will allow it to get frail and weak.

When you read an article that talks about an 80-years-old’s desire for sex and you blush or feel embarrassed for that person, you’re also saying you expect your own sex life to whither after a certain age. Maybe fifty if you’re in your thirties. Or if you’re a teenager, you’ll think it happens when you’re thirty.

You see, when you assume older people lose their abilities with time, you’re also subconsciously assuming that’s normal. Just as in childhood, you assume you’ll grow up to be big and strong as your mother said you would if you ate your vegetables, you’ll talk yourself into believing old age automatically holds deminished capacity and loss of function.

For some, of course it does. A healthy lifestyle doesn’t prevent every incidence of cancer or dimentia. But people die and get sick at early ages, too. I had a brother die at age five because a life-saving drug hadn’t been invented yet. Another succumbed to cancer at 60 because, well. Cancer.

I’ve watched twenty-somethings die of AIDS and read of young people die of COVID-19 as well as other non-viral illnesses and accidents.

No one has a lock on a long, healthy life, nor do older ages always bring the stereotypical horrors depicted in jokes and drug commercials.

So stop being so gobsmacked that I can walk across the room and pick my nose at the same time.

So will you at my age, if you don’t put limitations on yourself.

Today, The New York Times featured a European couple in their late 80s who live miles apart but have figured out how to meet for lunch each day during the quarantine.

What do they miss? Sex and touching. And they are 85 and 89 years old.

So don’t talk to me about being surprised the elderly are not sexually dried up. If you think that way, you run the risk of programming your brain so that you will lose your libido as you age, too. And let me tell you, love is love, and sex is sex, whether you’re getting off as a teenager or an octogenarian. Assisted living can mean more than housing for the aged. If you get my drift. The point is, you’re getting off. Or doing a 2-minute plank. Or writing novels. Or inventing stuff.

There’s no guarantee you won’t suffer serious illnesses in your life. I certainly have, but I’ve been lucky that my ailments have been cured or remedied by medical science, mostly surgery. The small stroke I’ve suffered has mainly limited my ability to get up on a ladder, but not much else. I know other people my age aren’t as lucky.

You slow down with age, but that’s not the same thing as losing every skill or ability to function you’ve ever had. I’m grateful to my gene pool for contributing to my health and longevity, and my stubborn nature that refuses to believe I can’t do an 8-minute plank if I set my mind to it.

But whether or not I reach that goal is not the point. It’s fun to try to prove Robert Browning wrong that a woman’s grasp can exceed her reach, or what’s a quarantine for?

And that we can inspire one another throughout our lives, no matter how old we are because we all need uplifting from time to time. But we should never be amazed at what humans are capable of. We just have to try.

You’d be amazed!

I’m an editor and writer on Medium with Top Writer status. I’m also an editor for the publication, Rogues Gallery. I’ve published 55 titles on Amazon and edit 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. I’ll make sure you don’t miss a word. Thank you for reading.