Thoughts on Growing Older

The Petchary has plenty of other things to write about.  But, setting them aside for now, she needs a little introspection on this matter of ageing, on the eve of her sixtieth birthday.

Yes, sixtieth.

I have jotted down just a few reflections here.  Firstly, one has to overcome and endure the exclamations (“But you don’t look it!” and “Age is just a number,” and so on) from kind and well-meaning friends and acquaintances.  Well, physically one looks (and feels) it, but the spirit remains the same.  Why should it – why would it – be any different from the same spirit, the same inward self, that I was at sixteen, or thirty, or forty-five?

WB Yeats, the somewhat disheveled Irish poet

The Petchary is very fond of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats.  Here he is with his poem “When You Are Old,” which has a quiet melancholy to it:

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,	5
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled	10
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yes – I think of myself as a pilgrim soul.  But so are all the other souls around me; and, especially, my husband and son, stepping along the dusty road that winds round the mountainside with me, and sitting down to rest along the way, arms round each other.  In the past few years, first my father and then my mother have stepped off the road for a while; they are resting together in a quiet grove of trees, and sometimes call out words of encouragement.

The dusty old road we pilgrims walk is something like this, I believe

Unlike Mr. Yeats, however, I don’t find that love has fled.  It is actually a more powerful force than when the Petchary was twenty or thirty years younger. Then, she used to wonder whether love was an artful fabrication, a burden to be endured, a ridiculous fantasy, a complete fake (like romantic comedies, and the dreadful movie “Pretty Woman,”) – something you were supposed to “feel,” but didn’t.  No one tells you when you are young that love is a slow burner, it’s not just romance or sex, it’s something much deeper than that, sliding along like a slow river that sometimes skitters over stones and at other times flows dark and strong.  But you keep following that river.

This is the kind of love I am thinking of, I think (yes, still an old hippy at heart)

So, for the Petchary, growing old goes something like this – here’s my “top ten” – and perhaps #1 ought to be right there but apart from that this is in no particular order.

1. You feel just the same, inside, and wonder why younger people don’t understand that.
2. You have veered further and further away from “organized religion.”
3. On the other hand, you somehow feel a more “spiritual being”, and as time goes by, you start believing there is something to the reincarnation thing after all (I now carefully rescue drowning spiders from the bathwater).
4. You find that you can actually enjoy doing something that you are good at.
5. You don’t feel really different physically, but odd unexplained twinges (knees, my left wrist that I broke some eighteen months ago, stomach, toes, whatever) occur regularly.  So what.
6. You get to love young people, and that light in their eyes.
7. Babies become slightly odd creatures (they are, aren’t they?)  But I may feel differently if/when I become a grandmother.
8. You love art, music, books, movies more than ever, and they become your expression too (and in my case, writing in particular).  It all flows beautifully.
9. You have an increasingly sweet tooth, and don’t always feel as guilty about it as you should.
10. (This should be the joint #1) you love and appreciate your husband and son, your fellow-pilgrims, more deeply each day.

I know, I am ending on a sentimental note, but I have to say just one more thing.

I am grateful.

This is the kind of thing I am grateful for... I took this photo of the "supermoon" or perigee moon near our house on March 19, 2011

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