Difficulties when getting older are mentioned too often by too many. Less often mentioned is: there are good things about getting old, as compared to aging. When you’re ‘old’ you have lived longer than people around you. Your past experiences are more varied. You have had more failures and more successes; more time to figure out what works for you..
Despite your priority on things you choose to store in your brain, it will be filled with trivia, some new and useful, some outdated. However, not everything new is better, including everything most expensive as some assume..
Another good thing about old is that you no longer have to climb real of virtual mountains (assuming that you might have when you were younger. Personally, if I ever had the urge, I used to lie down until it passed). Some people stress about not having been able to cram in everything they think they must see, own, or do, to have lived a full life. Whether one travels to see more poverty than right here now, miss experiencing Machu Pichu in situ, while gasping to breathe, or don’t catch every latest movie, play, museum offering, most people will never get it all and feel complete. Stress is relieved when one can say, I’ve had a full life and now I’d like some time to digest it all.
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We all reach our senior status differently. It is a time when we can say, ‘been there, did that, gave at the office’ and as a remarkable one once wrote, ‘I shall wear purple’. It is a time when you know yourself and do not care if people judge you as eccentric when you do as you please. Truth can be told, opinions given, whether people listen or not, .because we now know that we all live in our skin only. Regardless of what we might say or advise, we know that we have lived our lives, made our mistakes, and must allow others to do the same. We should have, by now, set our own boundaries. If we have not, we will remain unhappy campers who feel intruded upon constantly. This assertiveness and lessened desire to deal with ideas that we know are ill conceived often rankles youth.. Joy is experienced in our old age when we are immune to what the young like to think as a role reversal. They think it is now their time to make decisions for their parents as they have raised children themselves.
However, there is no such thing as role reversal. Parents will always remain older and their adult children will never see them revert to infancy. Those adult children will never become parents to their parents, only caretakers (should they love their parents enough and have the time and energy to do that).
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