It's OK to Get Old

It really is O.K. to get old, because it’s going to happen anyway, isn’t it? We haven’t sinned against a righteous God, simply because our bodies are breaking down. And we can do all of sorts of things to try and postpone slipping from middle age into old age, but you know, that’s just a natural part of life, and there’s nothing wrong with slowing down and simplifying life and finding that you prefer small doses of company or none at all. That’s all OK. There’s nothing wrong with you or with me. It’s meant to be that way. I have stopped going to doctors, and no, I’m not going to get help for this “problem” that I have, because I don’t think we have any problems. We just have what God provides and brings us each day, and that same power is going to give us the grace to deal with an aging body or a weakening mind

The Joy of Being Alone

I avoid groups. I much prefer being with maybe one other person who can converse intelligently and with some wit. Most of the time, though, I find that I enjoy being alone, in total silence, because I am my own best company. Being alone a lot gives you time for reflection and meditation, and again I am amused by the pressure the world exerts on us to not do that. “It’s not healthy to be alone too much. It’s antisocial and it cuts you off from the mainstream, and your reality begins to drift into unreality. Stay young. Stay active, and with other people.” That whole “you gotta stay young thing,” which is so prevalent in our world today, absolutely cuts off the possibility of real reflection. It steals time to be given insights about life that are great comfort to us --- to me, anyway -- as I am moving in and through this last stage of life, old age. It’s a fabulous time. My god, I have never been so happy and so at peace. By the same token, things that didn’t use to bother me now just give me fits. It’s part of aging, and it’s perfectly normal and natural. That’s really what I want to say, if I have anything left to say of any importance in a world that isn’t real anyway, it would just be, “Good news. We’re loved. We’re protected. We’re provided for, moment by moment, during our entire voyage.” It doesn’t seem like it much of the time, but that’s the way it really is. It’s cool, folks, it’s cool. It really is, so let things happen, if possible. Now see, I’m trying to give advice, too. But gee, life does become a lot more pleasurable when we stop struggling to make things happen. They may not be meant to happen, and so they’re not going to, and you’re just swimming upstream and using up all that energy that could be spent maybe just enjoying life a little more.

Noise, Noise

I hate being around large groups of people now, because of the noise they make. The noise in a crowded restaurant, for example, is so intense and there are so many different conversations going on, if you are not already crazy, you will be driven crazy. One of the survival skills that we acquire as we get older is to filter out most of that stuff that we perceive is not going to be helpful to us. However, I find now that I’m losing that skill. I’m not able to filter everything out any longer. It all sounds like a constant cacophony.

Blaming Ourselves

So often I find myself in places that I never intended to be in. In fact, I may have worked very hard to avoid a situation, and yet, because I do not have free will, I find myself in that very spot. To me, it becomes apparent that somewhere there is a power that decides for us what is best, and the sad thing is, when unpleasant things happen, we tend to think that we screwed up. We’ve been taught to blame ourselves. “Oh, I made a bad choice. I wonder what it was that I did wrong.” And then there are those moments in life when the soul cries out, “But I didn’t do anything wrong. I never intended this. I never did anything to bring this on.” No, but it was planned, so it happened.

Real, Not Real

It is still easy for me to get caught up in the apparent crises and conflicts of the world. It’s so easy to start taking myself seriously again, and getting upset, instead of just seeing the humor in the situation and giggling, as I usually do, but that’s part of being human, too, getting caught up in the melodrama of the movie we’re all performing in. Sometimes it feels real, but thankfully, sooner or later that moment comes when even I can’t handle the absurdity any longer and I smile or screech hysterically. It all comes back to an awareness that this “reality” is just not real, and why should it be? There’s that word again, “real,” a “really” important word.

No Free Will

One of the reasons that I am more and more convinced that there is no such thing as free will is the number of times I still find myself doing things that I don’t want to do, but for one reason or another, I am compelled to do. If we really examine even one day -- what happened and the events that led up to each experience -- we’ll see the reasons that we made a particular, specific decision just the way we did. There was no choice. It may have felt like there was. We may take a lot of time doing what we call “considering” every viewpoint and every option, but the fact is we end up doing one particular thing whether we felt like it or not.

I do what I do for the simple reason that these are my marching orders. It has nothing to do with my having decided, because this is the wisest choice. I did it because it was in my script for the day, and there was nothing else I could do. And this is where all of us are, I think, all of the time -- in a stream that carries us along regardless of our wishes. Sometimes the stream carries us to such pleasant places that we could just stay there forever. But think about it. Sooner or later, everything changes. Then it’s time for the less pleasant experiences. There are many in life. And the great schoolmaster in the sky has said, “Get ready for another change, sweetheart.”

Modern Technology

I think it’s wonderfully ironic that modern technology never seems to come up with what you want. It’s very complex and very sophisticated, but it doesn’t meet my needs. For example, caller ID. What does that term imply? That the caller is going to identify himself or herself. Is this is the case? Oh, no. Technology, bless its heart, gives people the option of not identifying themselves. The phone rings, and you look at the caller ID, and it says, “unknown.” Really? Then why bother me with caller ID, if the phone is going to ring, and I’m going to look at it, and I still don’t know who the hell it is. Thanks again to all of you who offer a promise and then never fulfill it. And all of this at our expense, not yours.

A Tough Row to Hoe

I’ve been doing a lot of planting in my garden recently, and it’s been hard to keep some of the plants going. For one thing, the rabbits really like the marigolds and verbena and a few other things. They just eat them right down to the ground. Other plants, I think, find the soil to be very difficult. I have a hard time burying the plants deep enough because there’s so much rock – about four inches of gravel that is poured around the trailers, and it’s hard to get through that rock into some real soil. When I plant, I realize later that things are sticking up too high. The roots are exposed to the heat and will be dry no matter how much I water. In addition, when it heats up, you just can’t plant. No plant, no matter how hardy, can endure the heat and direct sun all day. For these reasons, I find that I have to work really hard. It occurred to me that this is essentially what love is. Love are those actions in which you feel encouraged to stay and keep trying instead of giving up and leaving, and we make such a virtue out of staying. I couldn’t care less. If we’re supposed to stay, we do, and if not, we leave. But that’s how God keeps us here. He causes love to continue to rain down on us, one way or the other. When we stop getting love, we really do start to die very quickly, and I can see it in the eyes of people I’ve been with who were coming close to death. I watched them go though these stages where, after a while, there just wasn’t enough love any longer to make you want to stay, when your body is that sick and in such pain, and your soul just longs to depart and get out of this pain and this boredom and go where you know the action is.

I look at these poor, struggling plants, and I can see them struggle, as if they’re on their last gasp, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to encourage them enough to make them want to stay. If they leave, I don’t blame them. I see us as plants in God’s garden, and without the love we get from the people who are placed in our lives for a purpose, there’s just not enough reason to stay. This is a rather cold, bleak, and unpleasant world if you don’t have family and friends to nurture you. Now, I want it understood, I’m not complaining. I’m not feeling very much love these days coming through people, but I certainly feel it coming through my garden, my music. Even so, it’s getting harder for these things to hold me here. I just long to be gone. But I’m being given the grace for the time being to hang on, and one of the things I’m doing with my time is talking into this tape recorder, and maybe some of this is going to be used by the Almighty in bringing some small measure of comfort into your humdrum lives, as Lina Lamont said, in Singing in the Rain.

It's OK to Curse

Does all of this mean that I no longer have bad days, that I’ve learned to control my days so that trouble rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back? Hardly. In some ways my fuse is shorter than it’s ever been, and something very little can cause me to fly into a rage. The interesting thing is that it’s over quickly. I’ve been taught how to release, and that may be scary to people nearby, when they hear me say, “Damn it!” However, I’m not wishing God’s damnation on anyone, I’m just expressing my frustration, and how much healthier to say “damn” that to go out on a playground and mow down a bunch of kids. And maybe that’s why so much of that is happening, in addition to the fact that it’s just part of the script and it’s supposed to be happening. People are so pent up. They are like springs, ready to just snap, and when a spring snaps, there’s a lot of force there ready to be released in a very short period of time. I just sound off all of the time and keep things in my life fairly defused. You know, if you do read about me going berserk sometime and wiping out an entire city, don’t be surprised. You’ll know that it was my turn. Gee, maybe I should be giving classes in anger management

Get Quiet, Get Ready

Amazingly, I have a busy, active life, even though I have virtually no scheduled activities any longer. I suspect that could end soon, and I might find myself involved in something. The Gods would be saying, “O.K., kiddo, vacation over, back to the grind for a while.” I dread the idea of going back. I don’t see how I could do it. Of course, if I was supposed to, I would find the grace. In the meantime, I’m really enjoying retirement and not having to do much of anything. I feel that I really have paid my dues in the past, and now it is my turn to kind of just slow down, and get quiet, and get ready.

More and More

More and more of my days seem to unfold with my being in solitude and, again, I smile, because most people, if they knew the amount of time I spend alone, would be more concerned for me than they already are. But I’m OK. Solitude, for most of us, is the best state to be in most of the time. I seem to be far happier and more at peace and more desirous of nurturing joy in my life than all of these concerned people around me. Just more irony all around us.

Can We Talk About Something Else?

The other thing I notice when I listen to other people’s conversations is how unhappy everyone seems to be. They are discussing the latest celebrity tragedy or world crisis with such relish. They are also very angry at what the other side is doing, but they are really just feeding off all of this disaster – “A woman was a vegetable in Florida fourteen years and somebody else opened fire on a school yard and this person divorced this person.” I think, “Oh, my God, is there really nothing more to talk about?”

Of course, there isn’t, if that’s all that’s going into your brain. Everyday I am thankful I got rid of my cable TV and newspapers, and the hardest thing I have to deal with in my life is people who say to me, “Did you hear about?” And I have to say, “No, I didn’t, and I would appreciate not hearing about it now. Remember, I got rid of my TV, and I got rid of my newspaper, and I don’t read magazines, so I wouldn’t have to know about these events, so why would I want to have you tell me about them? Please, let’s either talk about something else, or go quietly into the garden and let the flowers and birds do the talking.

Sit Back, Enjoy the Ride

I’m as active as I’ve been since I was a child, active in the sense of being completely engaged in something with body, soul, and spirit because I’m really enjoying it. This hasn’t been true for most of my life. I didn’t see it at the time, because, like all of us, I was too caught up in the activity itself. When you stand back after several decades and look over your life, you see that life is a boring journey with just enough enjoyment and tragedy to distract you from the boredom. I admit, I really look forward to being in a place where, I trust, it will be this kind of pleasurable, productive activity all of the time, activity that will be hard to distinguish from play.

There’s really nothing that lasts, thank God. Those things that we thought were wonderful triumphs, or even terrible mistakes, were just lessons planned for us. We had nothing to say about them. We thought we were initiating them, but we didn’t. They just happened, and the same thing is happening now. I don’t have to plan. I never did. It just felt as though I was planning. Now I am conscious of the fact that I am not planning anything, and it is a delight to see my day unfold as prepared by some all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present force without me having to do anything except sit back and enjoy the ride.

The best part of getting old is realizing that there really is no such thing as free will, and thank God. I can just enjoy this ride like I did when I was a child. I’m very blessed in that I don’t have many people in my life, and nobody that I’m really responsible for, so I don’t have people telling me, “You’re doing it wrong. You should have done it that way.” I can just enjoy my day as it unfolds without any critical voice to spoil it. When I’m in a place with lots of people, and I’m by myself, and I’m having to listen to conversations that I don’t want to hear, what strikes me is how judgmental everyone is. Everyone is trying to help everyone else out, with advice that they didn’t ask for and don’t want, and we ALL do it, me included. Except of course when I’m by myself, and I’m the only one that I can give advice to, and since I always like my advice, that’s O.K.

All Work & No Play

Another activity that comes and goes as it’s supposed to is talking into this tape recorder. For some reason I always feel, when I stop, that I’ve been, not at work, because I associate that word with having to do something whether you feel like it or not, but at play, a pleasurable activity that is also productive in some way.

My Technicolor Garden

I am very much aware that I have attempted to turn my garden into one of those marvelous old Fox or MGM musicals that, to this day, can send me off into a different world. There’s color everywhere, wonderful fragrances, and the sound of the water. The birds put on a show for me. They fight over the food in the feeders and then flit off to one of the fountains. Sometimes they take baths together, which I just love to see.