With Jim at Fenway Park, September 30, 2018 I’m old. Not in the usual physical ways of many people age 78, but I’m old in years, and that very fact guides any sense of meaning that I feel and experience in my life. Put succinctly, my age is the filter through which I lead my life.
Discussions about aging (blogs, books, magazine articles, advertisements, and personal conversations) seem unequivocally prefaced by physical failings, which then unwittingly become the cause and blame for any malaise an older person might have. There is a taboo against confessing our struggle to find meaning in our lives unless we link the cause to a physical problem. The psychological aspects of getting older are overshadowed by the physical.
Those of us older women who don’t relate everything we are feeling or experiencing to physical causes, walk around smiling and pretending to be sixty, the new seventy. We choose to remain silent, to keep secret our deepest wonderings about our purpose as our life diminishes day by day. At least that’s my observation, but how would I know? No one talks about it. I know, however, because I have such secrets, the biggest in the form of a question: What is the purpose in my life?
In this blog I plan to open up some of the secret questions that preoccupy older people, but that they don’t talk about: the young (under 70) don’t ask, we old (over 70), hold back. Why this monotonous dance of reluctance? It’s time for old people to take the lead and reveal their secrets.
Discussions about aging (blogs, books, magazine articles, advertisements, and personal conversations) seem unequivocally prefaced by physical failings, which then unwittingly become the cause and blame for any malaise an older person might have. There is a taboo against confessing our struggle to find meaning in our lives unless we link the cause to a physical problem. The psychological aspects of getting older are overshadowed by the physical.
Those of us older women who don’t relate everything we are feeling or experiencing to physical causes, walk around smiling and pretending to be sixty, the new seventy. We choose to remain silent, to keep secret our deepest wonderings about our purpose as our life diminishes day by day. At least that’s my observation, but how would I know? No one talks about it. I know, however, because I have such secrets, the biggest in the form of a question: What is the purpose in my life?
In this blog I plan to open up some of the secret questions that preoccupy older people, but that they don’t talk about: the young (under 70) don’t ask, we old (over 70), hold back. Why this monotonous dance of reluctance? It’s time for old people to take the lead and reveal their secrets.
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