It Ain’t for Sissies

I saw an old family friend at the supermarket over the weekend. We greeted each other, hugged, and began to visit.

“Are you keeping them all in line at the Tower?” she asked, referring to the apartment house I live in, which at six stories passes for a tower in a small farm town.

“Well, I do my best but I have a lot of trouble with it,” was my reply. “They’re all at least as ornery as I am.” Then we got kind of serious as I added, “But you know, I really think you need to be ornery if you’re going to live as long as some of those folks have.”

“Yes, you do,” my friend agreed. “A good sense of humor helps too.”

That didn’t surprise me; this lady has always been noted for her sense of humor and zest for life.

“And also, don’t you think it helps to be able to give?” she went on. “To give and take? That’s important too.”

I agreed, thinking of the teaching I’d recently reviewed about the staying power of trees in a wind storm. The old tree, the tall and thick and inflexible tree, will be uprooted in a powerful wind. It’s the sapling, young and bendable and flexible, that will survive the storm. And it’s the same with people. You have to be flexible, to roll with the punches, to go with the flow – or the storms of life will uproot you.

We parted and went on our separate ways. Maybe she continued to think about the exchange we’d had. I certainly did. Now that I am getting into the upper sixties, the aging process has become more personal, and I often find myself thinking about it.

Old age really isn’t for sissies. We have to be tough to survive the pitfalls of life. We lose loved ones, we lose money, we may experience a career change we hadn’t wanted to make, maybe we’re in abusive relationships, maybe we lose our homes in a tornado, we have all kinds of setbacks, all sorts of challenges to surviving life. We have to be strong, tough, and able to take the punches and still get up and struggle on. Surviving – and living a good life as we do so – requires every ounce of strength we have.

In fact, a lot of us find that it requires more strength than we believe we possess. That is one of the things that drive us toward religion in any of its multitudinous forms. Belief in God – however each of us conceives and understands that Entity – helps us to handle what seems overwhelming, when we feel so powerless, so puny against the challenges we face. Those of us who don’t turn to that Entity, to the Source of All Things…I don’t know how they get through life. They must be stronger than I am. I tried living that way once, and it was the greatest mistake I’ve ever made.

Is there anything else we can do to help ourselves live and age well? It almost goes without saying that taking good care of body and mind helps. It isn’t a guarantee. One friend of mine spent her entire adult life doing physical and psychological exercises, only to fall to something that seemed to me like the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.

Continuing to be active, to learn, and to play will also help us. It is important to keep growing. I firmly believe that the day we stop growing is the day we stop living.

We don’t even know that we will live long enough to reach old age. People in the prime of life get struck down by diseases like Parkinson’s or Lou Gehrig’s.

We have control over our own responses and choices, and that’s all we have to work with. The only thing we can do is…our best. And hope it will actually make a difference