Topic: Age
Psychology 101: Old guy compares life after retirement to childhood. As Lucy said in Peanuts, the doctor is in. This diagnosis bears about as much credibility as Lucy's, but her diagnosis cost a nickel as I recall, and at least this one is free.
In life, hopefully we are granted a long span of years. I am sixty-seven now, and in reasonably good health, so unless, unbeknownst to me, some nasty disease has my name on it I may be able to count on maybe another fifteen years or until my eighties. That is if heredity counts, as my parents both made it into their eighties. So with the fall weather approaching, and melancholia blowing in the air along with the leaves, I have become philosophical about it all, life up to now that is.
I have come up with this conclusion. It occurs to me that childhood up until middle teens, and old age, after retirement, is linked in this one marvelous way. Parallel frames of mind it seems to me existed within me fifty some years ago, and now in the next century. I feel a connection with that boy's feelings then as I do with the old guy he has become.
The childhood we are comparing was one of those normal, not too traumatic regular kind of childhood that most of us were lucky enough to have been granted; and an equal length of years in retirement, I will explain.
As I recall, and I will presume to speak for all of us, it's my ink; my childhood while not idyllic was certainly close enough to what I think idyllic means. My parents came out of the depression so money was not plentiful, but there must have been enough or my parents hid their distress from me very well. My frame of mind then, as best I can recall was one of contentment with no thoughts of having to make decisions, living in the moment, for the moment. I didn't know what was around the next corner, and was content enough living in the world as it was presented to me, either the real world or the world my parents made for me, either way I was happy.
This parallels exactly the feelings I have had from retirement to the present day. I am content, happy, worry free, and angst free. I again refuse to look too far around that corner. I am not an idiot, I know around that corner that I am not yet ready to consider is aging and all it's possible horrendous possibilities. Those possibilities, of course are illness in its many insidious forms and of course, since we have not figured out anyway of dodging it, death.
But being an adult and having a reasonably usable brain I have developed a private faith that even then I will enter another parallel existence of contentment and happiness.
What does this prove? Not a thing. But as thoughts fly in and out of our brains, this one stayed a moment too long and I put it on paper so you too can wonder..is he really sane?
Posted by jim2jak
at 5:44 PM EDT
Updated: Tuesday, 31 August 2004 12:54 PM EDT
