AGE is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. So wrote Mark Twain. We couldn’t agree with it more.
We must learn how to live a life free of prejudice associated with age. But you may think this strange, especially when the media keeps attaching an age every time a name is mentioned. “Joe Doe, 68, takes a young wife,” exclaims The Matrimonial Times.
Well, that is a fictitious example. But you get the point. Perhaps we shouldn’t. Attach an age to a name, that is.
But chronological age is something we come with. We have yet to invent a way to stop the clock from tick-tocking. Till death, do time and us part.
But time is a distraction. Epictetus of old has a point. What disturbs people’s minds is not events, but their judgments on events. We must learn how to be not so disturbed to master the art of being alive.
So how do we become the young ones? The first step is not to pension off the mind.
Be an ageless thinker. Be busy living life, and age will take care of itself. Just like we do in our dreams. Think about it. Do we age in our dreams? The baby, the teenager and the adult are all of the same age dreaming dreams.
If at all there is a place where we are forever young, it is in this dark world.
Here, our yesterdays are tomorrows that we are thinking of today.
Time is eternally present. So must our thinking be. Zest for life begins here.
Try not to surrender to the mind-forged manacles of ageing. Being an ageist ages us. Yes, age is important for the government to pay you the pension that you have been waiting for the last 35 years.
Or for others to give you the privileges of senior citizenship. But we mustn’t be Eliot’s Prufrock “measuring out life with coffee spoons” nor should we be wearing the bottoms of our trousers rolled to tell the world that we have grown old.
Second, go out there into the world and act as the unpensioned mind.
Read, write and converse. Be a full man. Or do what Francis Bacon wants us to: “Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand — and melting like a snowflake.”
Being 94 isn’t too old to work. It may have been. Not anymore. The young shouldn’t worry of the ageless stealing their jobs either. After all, youth and experience are two different things.
In this age of scam, this push for ageless living must come with a warning. Do not fall a victim to “forever young” marketing trickery.
Such claims teach us to be ashamed of our age. One cannot be more wrong. Wrinkles and grey hairs will come, sometimes unannounced.
Needle or no needle, we will age. Our advice is this: do not buy into such chicanery. Instead, learn the art of being alive at all ages.