The Great Thing About Getting Older – updated 2017
Day 3 of ‘Aging Week’.
My father is on the roller coaster that is old age, bone breaks and lung congestion. Not an easy thing for him to deal with. His efforts are continuing to cause me to think about the whole process of aging.
I remember when this quote made sense for the first time. I was talking to someone much younger than myself. I realized that he didn’t have the flow of time I had. He had gone through 25 years of life, and for him to consider the next 25 he had to project. I, on the other hand, had all 50 years to remember. I had the age of 30 in my memory, the age of 20, the age of 40. I hadn’t given up any of those years, I had just added to them.
It helped me realize why younger people can so often not understand older people. They simply have to take a much greater leap than when an older person has to understand a younger person. They haven’t lived that age yet. Of course, many older people forget what it was like to be young, but that is an issue for another blog entry!
“The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you have been.” – Madeleine L’engle, Author