nine

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to grow old and feel young. This is a difficult concept to explain. I think that our perception of what it means to be old is based on people older than us while our perception of youth is based on our own youth. Do we expect that when we are age 60 we will act and think like people who are 60 right now? But seniors today have attitudes there are the culmination of generations we were not a part of. They lived in environments that are foreign to us. No matter how old we lived to be we will never share those things and to that end as a generation our thoughts and actions will not match. What does it mean to feel old? I think the only way we can feel old is on physical level. We can sense we no longer have the vigor of youth. I think we can also feel old when our own ideas and values no longer match the world at large - the feeling that we are old-fashioned. Our ideas and attitudes evolve over time; however, our core beliefs will tend to stay the same. When you are eighty I guess you will think the same way you thought as a twenty year old but with some refinements.

So I'm really not trying to be deep or thoughtful or anything like that. I just want to capture some of these ideas as they hit me. Otherwise I'll forget them.