Comments on Aging

[Candice Wilmore]

A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.
Lydia M. Child


A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.
Pindar

A man has every season while a woman only has the right to spring. That disgusts me.
Jane Fonda (not sure what year she said this. cw)

A woman ninety years old was asked to what she attributed his longevity. I suppose, she said, with a twinkle in her eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.
Dorothea Kent

A woman past forty should make up her mind to be young; not her face.
Billie Burke

A woman's always younger than a man at equal years.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

[Jeanne]

Thanks for the thoughtful and provocative quotes, Candice.
I just couldn't resist jumping in with this George Carlin quote:

“The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What's that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating...
...and you finish off as an orgasm.”

~George Carlin

[Loretta Vasso]

Jeanne, this is fabulous. Thanks for posting the George Carlin quote. I think it's an apt way to view our emotional progression, as we age and get freer and freer. I feel at 58 that I'm getting ready for high school.

[Ron Tocknell]

Reaching my 60s isn't like anything I expected it to be. For a start, I expected to feel more vulnerable than when I was 20... I actually feel less vulnerable because most of the things I dreaded at 20 have already happened and they weren't so bad. Having already dealt with many of the What-Ifs and survived, the What-Ifs ahead are no longer a threat.

My youth was a time of pursuit of experiences and contempt of comfort. Now I enjoy comfort and quietness and the experiences I chased in my youth are still with me; not just in my memories but in who I am.

I get my aches and pains but they just remind me to take a more relaxed approach and certainly make sitting in a comfortable chair or immersing myself into a hot bath all the more enjoyable. I no longer have the vanity of my youth so losing my hair and my looks doesn't trouble me as I thought it would.

Nature has a reason for each of the changes she has led me through: She took away my hair to help me keep a cool head. She dimmed my eyesight to encourage me to look more closely and pay more attention. Perhaps, one day I'll also discover the advantage of having all this extra hair up my nose but, for the moment, it remains a mystery to me

[Jeanne]

Interesting post... especially "the experiences I chased in my youth are still with me; not just in my memories but in who I am."

I'll admit, Ron, I've wondered if nature thought that older folks are exposed to more dust and air borne particulates... therefore, more nose hairs are necessary.

Ron Tocknell said:

Reaching my 60s isn't like anything I expected it to be. For a start, I expected to feel more vulnerable than when I was 20... I actually feel less vulnerable because most of the things I dreaded at 20 have already happened and they weren't so bad. Having already dealt with many of the What-Ifs and survived, the What-Ifs ahead are no longer a threat.

My youth was a time of pursuit of experiences and contempt of comfort. Now I enjoy comfort and quietness and the experiences I chased in my youth are still with me; not just in my memories but in who I am.

I get my aches and pains but they just remind me to take a more relaxed approach and certainly make sitting in a comfortable chair or immersing myself into a hot bath all the more enjoyable. I no longer have the vanity of my youth so losing my hair and my looks doesn't trouble me as I thought it would.

Nature has a reason for each of the changes she has led me through: She took away my hair to help me keep a cool head. She dimmed my eyesight to encourage me to look more closely and pay more attention. Perhaps, one day I'll also discover the advantage of having all this extra hair up my nose but, for the moment, it remains a mystery to me