What a drag

The Stones were right.  It is a drag getting old.  You don't sleep as well as you did when you were younger and it seems as though some part of you is always hurting, even when you try to eat right and get regular exercise.  Activities that might have caused temporary discomfort when you were younger now result in permanent aches and pains that drive you to the doctor who sends you out for a whole serious of expensive, torturous and humiliating tests and then tells you that nothing showed up and you're just going to have to live with your problem.  Then  you get to do battle with Medicare and your insurance company to try to get them to pay their share of the mortgage on your doctor's vacation home.  You start to plan your travel routes more carefully to ensure that you're never too far from a clean restroom or out of cell phone range.  You find that a lot of your friends don't want to do anything anymore except sit around and talk about their own aches and pains and hospital visits and who died recently and who is probably going to kick off soon. 

Yeah, old age can be a drag, but the way I see it, it is a hell of a lot better than the alternative.  Sure, you could let yourself get depressed when you realize, like I did recently, that you've probably already lived four-fifths of your life and you're never going to be healthier than you are today.  On the other hand, you could just let that drive you to the realization that, if you don't have a whole lot of time left, you'd better make the most of what you do have.

I see a lot of older people that appear to me to fall into the extremes of the spectrum.  Some seem to be old before their time.  Those folks tend to stay home a lot and they're the ones who want to sit around and talk about all their troubles, complain about Social Security and Medicare and depress you with a long, detailed list of all their ailments and the particulars of every visit they've made to doctors, labs, hospitals and physical therapy facilities.  Others seem to want to pack as many things into their remaining time as they can.  I think of them as bucket-listers.  They volunteer for any outfit that will accept them, travel constantly and try to experience as many things as they can.  It seems to me as though a lot of them get enjoyment out of the individual things they do, but they always seem pretty harried as they try to cram more activities into their lives than there is time to really appreciate them.

My wife and I have taken kind of a moderate approach.  We've decided that we're not going to let aches, pains and chronic problems keep us from doing the things we enjoy, but we do allow ourselves some time to relax and savor the memories of things we do.  So, if we have planned a day trip and one of us has an attack of IBS or we have overdone some physical activity and have an annoying pain to deal with, we suck it up and make the trip anyway.  That might mean we have to opt for the grilled chicken breast sandwich instead of the ancho chile tequila lime shrimp fajitas and micro brewery sampler or maybe just take a picture of the 375 steps to the top of a historic monument instead of making the climb, but at least we made the trip, experienced the flavor of the site and have some neat photos to look over the next week when we are home taking it easy.  It also gives us some good memories to focus on the next time we are trying to keep a hospital gown closed while some nurse or technician installs a port or inserts a probe into an embarrassing place.  So there's that advantage.

A lot of the older folks I've met lately appear to focus on the negative things that might happen if they get out of the house and away from their familiar haunts and do something new.  I guess it's just too much trouble for them to deal with the unfamiliar.  I hear things like “Oh, I don't want to eat at a one-off cafe because I have dietary restrictions and they might not have anything I can eat”  or “I've heard that that town has a lot of crime so I don't want to go there and maybe get mugged” or “I'm not feeling all that well today so I'm just going to stay home and not make the field trip with the club”.  Fortunately neither my wife nor I have ever been the kind of person who viewed life as a spectator sport.  So we're willing to take a little bit of risk in order to have a new experience.  Yeah, sometimes those little one-off cafes end up having lousy food, service and hygiene, but lots of times we run into a really good one and get to meet some interesting local characters there as well.  I have to admit that we do exercise some caution when we are traveling in an area that might be a high-crime area.  Sometimes we don't stop if we get bad vibes about the place or at least we try to maintain a low profile.  Generally, though, we just stay aware of our surroundings and watch out for each other.  When we recently did the grand tour of Texas Independence historical sites, we had to drive through a few neighborhoods that looked pretty unsafe to us.  We bit the bullet and pushed on through to our destinations, although we decided to hold off stopping for lunch until the neighborhoods looked a little safer.  Then we stopped at one-off places and had a great lunch in every one of them.

The point I'm trying to make with this rambling diatribe is this:  If you don't have a heck of a lot of time left compared to the number of years you've been around to date, then it seems to me that you should concentrate on the positive things you can still do and try as much as possible to ignore the negative things and enjoy your golden years.  Sure, you can play it safe and try to hold onto the rest of your remaining years by sitting home and thinking about all of the bad things you're avoiding by not going out; and you can worry about your health and focus on the fact that you can't do the things you'd like to do if you had more money and a younger body.  Or... you can ignore all that negative stuff and make the most of your remaining years by doing what you want to and can still do.  It's easy.  My approach is kind of like the Burt Campbell character on the old sitcom "Soap".  He used to cross his arms, click his fingers and make himself invisible.  I just do that and make all my worries and troubles disappear so I can enjoy life.  You can do that too.  Burt and I grant you that power.  It's yours to use.