Sage old age

Are you on the verge of being declared a senior citizen by every description of the word in every part of the world? And do you have in your household or among your family and friends someone a decade or two older? Tell me, then, if some or all of these things happen to you and drive you around the bend, making you want to throw up your hands and yell, “Have some regard for my stressors and strains!”

You get up in the morning, a little bit stiff here and there; so you go for your constitutional in the hope of loosening up and breathing the early morning air to make the blood flow to your brain and allow you to face the day ... and then you come home to a older relative who is dragging himself from his bed with not a care in the world since your generation is doing the rest of the nitty gritty of daily living. You naturally rush to prepare tea and serve breakfast, the nagging aches shelved for the moment when you get a chance to breathe — and you are blithely told that ‘youth’ is the time for all the rushing about you are doing.

Youth, you wonder? When did that description of the 20- and 30-somethings suddenly stretch to include you too?

If you have not been on the receiving end of one-liners thrown at you from the older and wiser members of your family or your group of friends, you are probably one of those older and wiser ones yourself, always ready to make the ‘inexperienced’ 40-, 50- or even 60-somethings aware that they haven’t quite got the hang of life until they’ve reached your great age!

Respect

Whichever side we are on, the receiver or the giver, how do we guard against completely forgetting what we did in our time? “I’ll try and be more diplomatic when I’m the older one,” we think. “I’ll keep my own counsel. I’ll respect the passing of the years and the tolling of the bell for everyone.”

But that rarely happens.

Today, I talk to a young mother who is run off her feet by her kids and I don’t empathise; I’ve forgotten my time in her shoes. I think instead that a spring chicken like her has no business being tired and worn out with the normal workaday routine that everyone does.

To make matters worse, I tell her so, adding for good measure that in addition to the home and the toddlers, when I was her age I also had to contend with packing and unpacking home on a regular basis every year - and so much more.

Driven completely out of my fickle memory cells are the aching feet, the short cut meals, the tongue lashings to everyone within hearing distance..... Now it seems to me, I was all sweetness and light, full of energy and purpose, the four course meal I’d made at another time fresh in my mind and confused with the dry toast or nothing at all that everyone got the day we shifted house!

The elderly today fall back on selective memory. They forget how they felt when they were at all those milestones in their lives. They also forget that life was cleaner, easier and less expensive at that time.

They may not have had the conveniences we do now that supposedly make things quicker for us, but they had fewer people to contend with, they had less traffic on the roads, they spent less time at work and more at play no matter how important their job.

What would it take to get realistic and bring the ‘sage’ back into old age?

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.