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catinmylap) wrote2024-10-19 01:33 pm
catinmylap) wrote2024-10-19 01:33 pm
Age or not? State of mind versus state of body
I turn 68 in a couple of days, and it has gotten me to thinking about aging and how we experience it.
The primary effect I've noticed, for a long time, about getting older, is that one's perception of time seems to speed up. Things take me longer to do, and the time passes so very quickly. But someone once explained part of that to me as a matter of proportions. For instance, when you're 10 years old, a year is a whole tenth of your life so far. At 60 years, one year is only a sixtieth of your life so far. It's a much smaller chunk of time in proportion to what you've already experienced.
In my own experience, other than that sort of time warp that happens, age has little effect on my state of mind. I still always have plans and ideas I want to carry through on. Possibly even more, now that I have more time to think about them. While I tend to think longer about things, that's because I've learned from experience that reacting too quickly is what can get me into trouble. It's not the mind but the body that starts to get in the way of doing everything the same as I used to. And yet, there are things that can affect the mind in ways I hadn't considered before, and they're maybe not so much about aging, but about the state of the world, and indirectly a result of aging, of retiring, of medical problems that seem to sprout like weeds as we get older. Side effects of aging, not the process itself.
For about four weeks now I've had some lower back issues, but instead of getting better on its own as it usually does, it has gotten worse. Now it's affecting one leg, all the way to my knee, and that knee refuses to do the things it normally is happy to do. It's beginning to get me down.
I had a court date last Friday (I'm being sued over some debt - I tried to do debt settlement and while two credit card companies agreed to settle, one bank decided to sue). So I had to walk a little ways in the court parking lot and then through the courthouse, both coming and going, and on the way out, my knee decided to give out on me, and I nearly fell, and then barely made it limping back out to the car. It's been bothering me ever since, and with the debt we're dealing with already - some of it medical - I'm trying to just take care of this on my own.
I think the back problem not getting better right away has more to do with anxiety over the lawsuit than about age, because when I'm anxious I tend to tense up, and I've been in an almost constant state of anxiety since I started this debt settlement journey about 1-1/2 years ago, and that anxiety has ramped up quite a lot since the lawsuit began in late April. But even before that, I had noticed that my anxiety was having an effect. I had started making a pair of hand-knit socks that wound up being so tightly knit they wouldn't fit, and I didn't even notice while I was knitting them that I was knitting so tightly. I'm an experienced knitter, and these were not my first socks, so it wasn't that I didn't know how. It was stress.
So this back and knee problem has given me some idle time to think about age, and how it works.
The body may slow down, and yes if there's cognitive decline the mind as well, though thankfully that's something I'm not dealing with, at least not yet. But while the body starts to go, the mind still feels young. Experience changes that a little, but honestly most of the time I still think as though I'm a young woman. When I dream at night, my dreaming self is maybe in my twenties or thirties. It's hard to say, but there's definitely no question of aging. There might be older people in my dreams, and I'll think of them as old, but not myself.
My mom used to say, in my parents' later years, that my dad was a young man in an old man's body. He would still try to do things around the house that he had done when he was younger, and didn't seem to accept that he couldn't. I recall once calling them, when if I recall correctly they were both in their mid-seventies, and her telling me my dad was up on the roof. I sort of panicked and asked what was Dad doing on the roof!? He was trying to do some minor repair there and had no patience with waiting for or attempting to get someone younger to do it.
That's how it feels. You still have all these plans and ambitions, and even needs, and it's hard to tell yourself you can't. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to tell ourselves we can't. But slowing down is always, I think, even when we're young, something to consider doing. Thinking things through, planning out how one will accomplish them, and not just reacting to everything. That's always good advice. So maybe the advice for aging is the same as that for growing up. Don't be in such a hurry.
I'm determined to not chalk my current limitations up to age so much as to stress, and thinking about ways to deal with that. There was a time, years ago, when I used to meditate every day, and I'm open to trying that for a while to help with this current anxiety. I'm still determinedly, inside, that woman in her twenties or thirties, with plans.
The primary effect I've noticed, for a long time, about getting older, is that one's perception of time seems to speed up. Things take me longer to do, and the time passes so very quickly. But someone once explained part of that to me as a matter of proportions. For instance, when you're 10 years old, a year is a whole tenth of your life so far. At 60 years, one year is only a sixtieth of your life so far. It's a much smaller chunk of time in proportion to what you've already experienced.
In my own experience, other than that sort of time warp that happens, age has little effect on my state of mind. I still always have plans and ideas I want to carry through on. Possibly even more, now that I have more time to think about them. While I tend to think longer about things, that's because I've learned from experience that reacting too quickly is what can get me into trouble. It's not the mind but the body that starts to get in the way of doing everything the same as I used to. And yet, there are things that can affect the mind in ways I hadn't considered before, and they're maybe not so much about aging, but about the state of the world, and indirectly a result of aging, of retiring, of medical problems that seem to sprout like weeds as we get older. Side effects of aging, not the process itself.
For about four weeks now I've had some lower back issues, but instead of getting better on its own as it usually does, it has gotten worse. Now it's affecting one leg, all the way to my knee, and that knee refuses to do the things it normally is happy to do. It's beginning to get me down.
I had a court date last Friday (I'm being sued over some debt - I tried to do debt settlement and while two credit card companies agreed to settle, one bank decided to sue). So I had to walk a little ways in the court parking lot and then through the courthouse, both coming and going, and on the way out, my knee decided to give out on me, and I nearly fell, and then barely made it limping back out to the car. It's been bothering me ever since, and with the debt we're dealing with already - some of it medical - I'm trying to just take care of this on my own.
I think the back problem not getting better right away has more to do with anxiety over the lawsuit than about age, because when I'm anxious I tend to tense up, and I've been in an almost constant state of anxiety since I started this debt settlement journey about 1-1/2 years ago, and that anxiety has ramped up quite a lot since the lawsuit began in late April. But even before that, I had noticed that my anxiety was having an effect. I had started making a pair of hand-knit socks that wound up being so tightly knit they wouldn't fit, and I didn't even notice while I was knitting them that I was knitting so tightly. I'm an experienced knitter, and these were not my first socks, so it wasn't that I didn't know how. It was stress.
So this back and knee problem has given me some idle time to think about age, and how it works.
The body may slow down, and yes if there's cognitive decline the mind as well, though thankfully that's something I'm not dealing with, at least not yet. But while the body starts to go, the mind still feels young. Experience changes that a little, but honestly most of the time I still think as though I'm a young woman. When I dream at night, my dreaming self is maybe in my twenties or thirties. It's hard to say, but there's definitely no question of aging. There might be older people in my dreams, and I'll think of them as old, but not myself.
My mom used to say, in my parents' later years, that my dad was a young man in an old man's body. He would still try to do things around the house that he had done when he was younger, and didn't seem to accept that he couldn't. I recall once calling them, when if I recall correctly they were both in their mid-seventies, and her telling me my dad was up on the roof. I sort of panicked and asked what was Dad doing on the roof!? He was trying to do some minor repair there and had no patience with waiting for or attempting to get someone younger to do it.
That's how it feels. You still have all these plans and ambitions, and even needs, and it's hard to tell yourself you can't. I'm not even sure it's a good idea to tell ourselves we can't. But slowing down is always, I think, even when we're young, something to consider doing. Thinking things through, planning out how one will accomplish them, and not just reacting to everything. That's always good advice. So maybe the advice for aging is the same as that for growing up. Don't be in such a hurry.
I'm determined to not chalk my current limitations up to age so much as to stress, and thinking about ways to deal with that. There was a time, years ago, when I used to meditate every day, and I'm open to trying that for a while to help with this current anxiety. I'm still determinedly, inside, that woman in her twenties or thirties, with plans.