We are getting older – all of us regardless of who you are – whether you are 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 or more. Changes are always happening in our lives – and we need to be thinking about the aging process and what is going on – especially if you are on the upper end of the spectrum… Louise Aronson, in her book ELDERHOOD says this:
“At the age of apparent aging, the once distant land called “old” no longer seems foreign or exotic to me. Daily, my joints offer protests. Sometimes one has a solo; more often there’s a noisy blur of voices, the new background music accompanying my every movement. I regularly switch among my three pairs of multifocal glasses, each with a different function. I have a faulty gene, a history of cancer, and seven visible surgical scars, and am now missing several nonessential body parts. These days, when something goes wrong in my body, I don’t just consider how it might be fixed; I worry that fixing it won’t be possible and that my new debility will not only endure but beget a cascade of injuries and additional disabilities. In my head, I hear the childhood song about how the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone, the leg bone’s connected to the hip bone, and so on. Although it’s not yet clear how it will go down, I can now imagine me = old, even if I still sometimes register my relentless progress toward citizenship in that vast territory with surprise.” (from: Elderhood, by Louise Aronson, p. 78)
Watch this blog for more to come on this topic…