OLD NEED NOT BE UNHAPPY

For years I have been piling up reasons that are good about being old. A recent one added is that old people have a far greater store of happy memories to call on than do younger ones. When you are young, there have to be wonderful days of praise, achievement, accolades, raises, etc. When you are old, every day above ground is a good day.

I've written before on annoyances in later life (see this blog: http://ewelts.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html February 10
Graceful Aging, on 6-23-08: http://ewelts.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html

I have heard it said that people mellow with age. I never understood that statement until recently. As you age, the earliest childhood inputs become as clear as though events just happened. We are more mellow, closer to our parents than we have been for many years. During those years of growing up, we had introjected the parents so that they are now a part of us. Remembering their comfort, support and decision making, we remember the safety and peace they provided for us as children. They live in our heads. We feel calmer and more mellow, or we go into complete separation and denial of the new generation (our grandchildren) and its parents (our adult children).

As with all things, there may be alternative reasons, such as, some people are just too tired to make waves any longer. They look quite calm much of the time. Maybe, though it is rarely admitted by parents, they just don't give a damn! Having spent so many years raising their own difficult, acting out and time-consuming children it gives the older family members joy to see their children finally understanding what their parents went through as they agonizingly wade through the same exhausting process with their own children. Usually that is when they finally come to truly appreciate their parents. Since their own children take the usual 2 or 3 decades to grow up and leave, the pleasure the old folks receive matches the years of servitude to the 'kids'.

What to a younger person may represent being alone and lonely, to the senior it represents a time of peaceful space inside and outside one's head to enjoy Nature, life in general, people, or whatever else we old folk like to take in as our due and our own.

We feel we earned the right to make our own choices, live our lives with abandonment of many of the earlier responsibilities, deadlines, and selflessness that precedes the 'Golden Years'. While the value of Gold as a metal has gone up exponentially, the value of the Golden Years as quickly dipped as far as the current Stock Market. Since we have Google to keep us informed, those younger no longer have to ask old people for advice or opinions. They have little understanding that the old people enjoy watching the young ones make all the same mistakes because they are too steeped in their own importance to ask someone who knows. One of these days I will find the three pages that I have noted and learned about, the good things about being old that I have not written here now. Youth just seems to last three or four times longer, accounting for how tired we all get when old!