Earlier this year I
turned 70.
No big deal, but I do notice things like outfitting the boat and raising
the sail now take more out of me than they used to. And the handwriting is on
the seawall: not yet, not next season, but soon enough it will be time to do
more armchair boating than the real thing. That’s life.
In this
philosophical frame of mind I thought I would share a few original observations
about life and aging. But since I have increasingly few original thoughts (and
as Oscar Wilde said, “I’m not young enough to know everything!”) I decided to
pass along some observations I cobbled together from those made by others.
It’s been
observed that a man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is
going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end,
perhaps having the mourners wondering too.
I have reached
the age where I might be forgiven a little preoccupation about immortality. For
my part, I agree with Woody Allen who has stated he doesn’t want to achieve
immortality through his work; he wants to achieve immortality through not
dying.
A fellow who
almost did that, George Burns, said "You can't stop getting older, but you
don't have to get old." But even he
observed that you know you're getting older when you bend over to tie your
shoes and wonder what else you can do as long as you're down there.
And like
Winston Churchill, who apparently told the French people – in his inimitable
French: “Quand je regarde mon derrière,
je vois deux parties” – I see two parts of the past. On the one hand, my youth, where, as Mark
Twain suggests, capacity for pleasure is boundless but opportunity limited; on
the other, old(er) age, where opportunity is on every hand, but capacity is
sorely diminished.
I guess that
brings me back to raising the sail.
Comments
Post a Comment