From the scornful safety of youth, it seemed hilarious that we might end up old. Although the eldest at home, I remember thinking in my late teens, that a cousin who was 30 had reached a grand old age. Now I look around and find that all remaining three members of my immediate family are well past half-a-century. Although the arithmetic is inescapable and the mirror tells the truth, the age I am deep down is certainly no more than 50. And I’m not the only one who feels that way:  most of us find that outside of the body beginning to fall apart we don’t think our age. There does not seem to be a clear correlation between my physical state and my mental state. 

“Fifteen minutes after fifty you are sixty, and then in ten minutes more you are eighty-five,” said Don Marquis a New York writer.

The problem with age and the different stages of our life is that you are absolutely, totally unconscious that you are in that particular age bracket – except when you have to fill in  a questionnaire. Then it suddenly dawns on you that you can no longer tick the 20 to 35 bracket; or indeed the 35 to 50 either. The commercial world, always ready to pounce on our insecurities, assures us that if we pop enough vitamins, slather on enough cream,  inject Botox and acquire bee-stung lips, we will be armed against the invasions of age. Absolute nonsense of course. Some of these things help and are reassuring but will certainly not stop nature taking its course.

In the last thirty or so years, an historic revolution has occurred in the adult lifecycle. Young people are waiting until their 30s to leave home and get married. More women want jobs and even careers and therefore postpone having children. Many are having children at 40 or over. And I don’t mean test tube babies. Claudia Cardinale was one of those who dared have a child at 40. 

This is the age when 50-year-olds look 40, 60-year-olds feel like 50 and 70 year-olds, like 60. People are taking longer to grow old. However, to society the older you grow the less your life means because you’ve lived more of it already, even if when you stop to think, you wonder where all those years have gone. The fear of death may be there for many because we are no longer young enough to feel immortal. However, in conversation with others I find that those of us who have experienced the death of dear ones closely do not fear it at all. As Leonard Cohen, the writer and singer said in an interview: “It is not death which worries me, it is the preliminaries. And perhaps there will be a 4th chapter, who knows?” The hope and prayer of everyone I know more or less my age is that we shall not get so ill that we will be a burden on our children; or finish up in an old people’s home, no matter how posh. 

Many can now expect to live until their 80s and even 90s. Foolish are those of a certain age who believe they will do little else with their lives but sit morosely planning their evenings by circling TV programmes in Gwida. Those of us privileged enough to have grandchildren are now in a position to enjoy them and give a helping hand.   

Previous generations tactfully aged behind closed doors with the lights low. A visit to church in the morning and possibly in the evening, too, with television and radio in between, became a way of life; hanging around in their dressing gown, waiting for death. An acquaintance told me: “When I was about to retire the first thing I did was say to myself: I am not going to be a dressing-gown man.” And he isn’t.

The sedentary pensioner is going to be a thing of the past although ageism is fast replacing sexism. A Third Age enquiry I read about somewhere or other found that although people say they’re looking forward to retirement to do all the things they’ve always wanted to do, when they actually get there, the only two things they do more of are reading the newspapers and watching television. They lose links with the larger world that used to exist for them mostly through their work. 

Gail Sheehy, in her book, New Passages: Mapping your life Across Time writes: “Just as in every other major passage during late middle age we enjoy a heightened potential for making a leap of growth, but we can also fall back into entropy or depression or simply ignore the impulse to change… and remain stuck.” It is easy to fall into despair when we come to a certain age: to surrender to the conviction that time is too short to start another life; to talk ourselves into believing that at this stage there is little to look forward to except boredom, loneliness and death.

There are plusses in the Third Age too. By now one has acquired resilience, having mastered the predictable and unpredictable crises of life. Most have attained self-mastery – to control our first impulses and unruly feelings. And one can stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction and paradox. And once we reach a certain age we tend to view the world with bemused detachment. “As Ovid has sweetly in parable told, We harden like trees, and like rivers grow cold.” But not too cold I hope.

What is important especially in our restraining society is breaking taboos, taking risks, bursting out of other people’s expectations and leading your life in your own light – instead of living by the social ‘shoulds’ and the expectations of others.

Apart from the slow, downward slide of the flesh, which one can do very little about, age depends also upon the persona we present to the world.

In the Third Age we don’t have to prove anything anymore. You can take the risk of doing what you have always wanted to do. You are no longer task-oriented. It’s a great challenge and one doesn’t have to be scared the way one may have been when young. One has nothing to lose and one has already proven one’s self. We have to choose aliveness over stagnation. 

Of course the child within us is ever present. Sometimes one wishes to relinquish all responsibilities even for one’s self. There are times when I long to lean on my mother’s or father’s shoulder knowing that I am not responsible for anything more than brushing my teeth and not even that if, after a family evening out, we got home late enough. If the ball on my icecream cone fell off, my mother would give me hers. That was the time that I had not yet developed a sense of the absurd – the kind of unblinking world-weariness that inevitably comes to the middle-aged and eighty-year-old rocking-chair sitters.

I hold the Zen view that mirror and navel-gazing are equally ageing. If you look for signs, you find them; if you don’t look they are not there. 

I have not become disillusioned – though my idealism has fallen by the wayside. Perhaps this is because I grew up without many illusions to begin with. My generation was sensible, realistic, literal-minded and socially conscious. Few things shock or surprise us; little jolts our sureness that our way is right. We still speak of moral fibre, character, honesty, openness, commitment and the concept of trust – no longer today’s language unfortunately.

Bloggers can go on bleating about me having ‘one foot in the grave’ or call me ‘jolly little Marie’ meaning to be unkind of course. In any case I don’t expect to feel old until I’m at least 80, unless I fall ill. Whether I shall look it or not is another matter. But it is only at 80 that I might concede that I’m old, but not a minute before.

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