Ageing gratefully

There is an old Hawaiian homily that goes something like this: “Age is relative; when you are over the hill, you pick up speed”. Indeed, the older I get the more I seem to age faster. Contrary to my expectation that life as a sexagenarian would move along slowly, occasionally resting a while to catch up with friends over coffee and cookies, I find myself being fast forwarded like an old cassette in a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder for the ignorant). Ageing heralds the onslaught of time on your mind, body and, ultimately, soul. No amount of medical miracles or elixir purchased by all the money in the world can halt your free fall. But it remains with us, or at least with most of us, to decide how we descend once we are over the hill. You can choose to tumble down, run down or simply do it one step at a time, avoiding broken bones and egos.

All around, most people are hurrying past me. Some friends have learned the art of letting things go and pretend to keep abreast by living in the increasingly make-believe world of social media. Others have decided that they are done running after others, and now run for themselves having the time of their lives—golfing, travelling and even climbing mountains. Some seem to be enjoying a second wind behind them, reliving the follies of youth with even greater vigour and energy! Unfortunately, I find myself bereft of any meaningful strategy to cope with ageing. For me, there is no mantra like sixty is the new middle age. If I run fast I fall down. If I am measured and deliberate, others leave me behind. If I decide to live for myself, I am labeled selfish. And if I try to find a second wind, all I get is some hot and humid air suffocating the soul out of me!

Sometimes I feel my life is like an old car ambling along at 35 kmph and then there is a sudden involuntary jerk to the accelerator and I seem to tumble forward as if to catch a fleeting moment. At first I would dismiss these fast forward moments to aberrations of an otherwise sloth like existence. But, of late, these sudden accelerations have been following a pattern. I get these regular urges to do everything quickly as if I can hear the clock ticking behind me loud and clear. Whether it’s the golf course or the season finale, I want to be there first.

So, it’s not just that others have little patience with me. My own patience with the world is running thin. I am taking short cuts. Take golf, for instance. After the first hole, I start wondering if the second hole is necessary since I find it irritating that it should be lying there as a barrier between me and the third hole. And the same goes for the third, fourth and, in fact, all eighteen holes after that. I look askance at fairways that seem to stretch for hundreds of miles ahead, making me wonder if the green is on another planet. It has taken the fun out of golfing—not just for me but for my golfing partners as well. Lately I am being avoided at the course like the plague.

I never had the patience to watch movies in a cinema hall even earlier when one went to cinema halls to actually see a film. Nowadays, a trip to the cinema is like an outstation holiday. And it costs the same if not more. I would never survive a visit to the multiplex with four screens and entire cafes displaying menus whose price lines are longer than the procession at the cash counter. So, I continued to watch TV at home and it had been going along nicely with Netflix, Prime, YouTube and others until the virus of the golf spectre entered my home too. Five minutes into a murder mystery and I want to know who the killer is. I jump from the first episode to the last as easily as I skip the Tees and the Holes. The opening credits challenge my patience. They seem to roll on forever like a Hindi soap opera which has a starting point but no end. Names of the one million people who have made your viewing pleasure possible stare back at you, reminding you that while the movie may be produced by X, it is also co-produced by Y, who collaborated with Z, who in turn appears to have co-directed it with XX under the banner of the Production House of A, with C being the presenter. Of course, none of this could have been possible without D, whose soul now rests in peace, and so on and so forth, until you wonder if there's a story between the lines here. In my present state of mind I feel as murderous as the purported villain and therefore often fast forward to the last scene of the movie or the climax of the last episode, doing away with the tedious formality of actually watching from start to finish. Instant karma or justice for all, I call it!

I am struggling to find a middle path. Both deceleration and acceleration are not suiting me. I have often been told how some people are ageing gracefully. That doesn’t appeal to me, either because I believe one cannot age gracefully if time is working overtime to suck all the grace out of a once young and supine body. Besides, if one is steadily and surely descending into a state of mental vegetation as well, grace doesn’t come easily.

I look back at a life well lived with the one grace that beats all others—the grace of God upon me and my family. Whether resting on tired feet or climbing mountains, one should be grateful to have reached old age and still retain the choice to make a choice on how to live. So perhaps it would not be a bad idea to age gratefully instead.

Views expressed are personal