The Curse of Aging--Part I - Narrowing Places

I described in my opening post, about the has-been movie star having an epiphany about being old. The experience was abrupt and final. Her life was defined as before and after the event of the epiphany.

I think my experience has been more typical, where a serious of events happen that brings home the truth of the loss of youth.

I can remember clearly the first time this type of event occurred in my life. It was when I was of the young age of 26. Denise and I were watching the 1984 winter Olympics (Sarajevo) on TV each night and I suddenly felt the loss of the fact that I would never be an Olympian. I know it sounds silly and Denise certainly thought so at the time, but it was very real.

It wasn’t like I had been in training for the Olympics. I had just taken up Nordic skiing, but I never, even in my wildest fantasies imagined that could even ski competitively even on a high school circuit. But it was the realization that doors were starting to close as I got older.

When you are a little boy (and probably the same applies to little girls) you are often taught that the whole world is yours for the taking. You can be a brain surgeon, if you so want. You can be a pilot, start the next Microsoft, be president of the United States . . . or you can be an Olympian athlete . . . only if you set your mind to it and work hard.

But for me, the very first time that I realized that aging meant the loosing of opportunities, seemed to be a profound event.

Recently a study was published (and mentioned in the public media) that showed the lowest point in one’s life—in regards to happiness—is around age fifty. Oddly, it improves from that point until the end of someone’s life. The happiest people, so it seems, are those over seventy. The reason it was suggested that 50 is the most depressing age is because that is when the realization of the loss of dreams and fantasies . . . many will indeed go unfulfilled in this lifetime.

I know that I will be eventually relating this to evangelicalism; however, I once had a discussion like this on a secular, medical forum. I was a little surprised how disappointed in me some people were when I spoke this way. They quoted all kinds of modern clichés about “never stop dreaming,” (or was that a lyric to a song they were quoting?). But there is this motivational-speaker type of pop-psychology which gives society this false hope (if you wonder what I’m referring to, go back and watch Little Miss Sunshine again and listen carefully to Olive’s dad.)

I remember specifically saying on that forum that I had given up and dream of climbing Mount Everest but I did still have a dream of reaching base camp. This one gal lectured me how “You will always be a failure because you don’t dream for the top.” So secular thinking is a farce on this topic as well. At a time like this I would love to share a beer or coffee with either Solomon or Caulfield. But I did, to my surprise, almost reach Everest base camp last year fare before I thought I ever would (Nepal wasn’t even on my radar when I had that original discussion).

A number of years ago, when I first started to enter the mid-life crises phase of my life, I attempted to write a novel that captured what this struggle is like for men. It was about two friends, one verbally distressed about growing older and the other was the stoic guy who seemed to have no concerns about anything, yet deeply he was much more distressed. For their one last attempt of fulfill a juvenile fantasy, they attempted (on a shoestring budget) be the first to fly a balloon around the world. The only balloon that they could afford was an old “Underdog” balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which they bought off of E bay. Anyway, that manuscript fell into the trash bin of along with my many other writings.

The point is, when I tried to come up with the title for this novel, I chose “Narrowing Places” because this best reflects this process of growing older and seeing your options growing more and more limited. So the first point of growing older is the loss of opportunities. I think that is significant. It means, a point will come when you realize that you will never do X, or be Y or see Z. Somehow all of this fits into the concept of the fall. We are not living the way we were designed to live. We were created for eternity, yet we must live in the temporal and that is where the tension (a polite word for “shit”) exist.

This first area is probably the lessor of pains associated with aging.