THA BEAUTY OF AGE

Have you ever been driving in the countryside and came across old abandoned buildings or farmsteads. I have done this many times and always something urged me to slow down or stop. The sight of those old weathered and dilapidated buildings begged me to know more about the lives that were lived there and if the buildings could talk-- the stories they would tell. There was a time long ago when the occupants, living and working there, were vibrant people with dreams and aspirations like all of us and I want to know if they were happy and if their lives were fulfilled.

Our own bodies are like that as we age. Like those old buildings we weather and turn all gray and lean a little bit. Our exteriors show the ravages and wear of time. The plumbing may leak and the roof covering get’s ragged and thin. Our eyes, the windows to our world, are not so translucent any more. Our frames get crooked and warped. But like those old buildings, it’s what lies inside of us, where the real beauty exists and the real story can be told. For within those often cluttered old minds, lives the genuine truth and the beauty of life.

I was once asked; if I could step into a time machine and was granted one trip, would I like to be eighteen again? My answer was “Only if I knew then, what I know now.”  It took me seventy some years to fill this meandering mind with memories and stories and they are the most precious thing I have right now because in a large part I earned each and every one of them. Were there things I’d just as soon not remember? Yes, many of them, so I have learned to push the delete button more and more as life goes on but sadly you can’t forget anything until, you first remember it. There are things we must forget if we want to go on with life. I learned in life that our hearts memory has a way of doing this itself and magnifying all the good things, if we let it.  Life can be a bit of a paradox for all of us but as we live it, we find out where all the pieces fit together and belong. It would be such a pity to unscramble it and start over again. Eleanor Roosevelt said and I quote. “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.”

What would life be without our memories and does it take a lifetime for us to really appreciate what has been going on around us? If old people governed the world, I contend most of this animosity and hate we now see would go away. Are we just to old and tired to hate and fight and that is the reason for our passiveness? I think not. It’s just that we been there before and we know the utter futility of it all. Arthur Golden wrote in “Memories of a Geisha,” Sometimes the things we remember are more real than the things we see.” But my favorite was the ever-humorous Mark Twain who said, “My memory is so good that some times I remember things that never even happened.”