Rant on Aging.

What matter of indignities age had in store for me... I had no idea. Ingrown toenails, fatigue, hematospermia, a growing paunch, lower-back pain, headaches that start from the neck, growing moles, cysts... and these are the external symptoms. It would require a team of specialists and a battery of high-tech equipment to chart the internal deterioration. The youthful feeling of invulnerability began to leave me around the time I reached age thirty, and it is nothing but a pleasant memory now. People warn you that it's going to happen when you are older, but no one really conveys the extent of ugliness that accompanies aging.

And this is all merely the beginning. I know that I look forward to all manner of surprises as I continue to experience the ravages of time. The body's breakdown gradually increases, until we are all a flabby and fragile mess. It is not surprise that my phone conversations with grandparents amount to a litany of physical suffering. Ordinary tasks such as mowing the lawn, or shoveling the walk become dangerous tests of endurance. I am constantly hearing about another body part in breakdown, and the possibility of many of these failures had not even occurred to me. The basic rule is that if it works now... it might not tomorrow.

All these sentiments are obvious. Anyone who expresses actual shock that he/she ages is either mentally retarded or hopelessly naive. But isn't it the case that actually experiencing this process is disconcerting nonetheless? We may think we understand what others are experiencing, but it is always abstracted until it's happening to our own body. That lump in the groin... that paroxysm of heart activity... that obscuration of the eye... these are all troublesome enough in theory, but only vague shadows until we live through them. We may believe that we understand when a loved one gets afflicted with something nasty, but we are still fooling ourselves if we think we know how they feel.

So what's the point? It may be easy to laugh at our age-obsessed society... our preoccupation with youth borders on the absurd... but the further we advance, the less humor we may be able to muster. There is a certain threshold beyond which changes in the body are almost always bad (and frightening). I suppose these are road signs on our path to mortality. Unless we take a short cut, or are forced off the road... we might as well try to take our time getting to that ultimate destination.

So the point is that to cope with the issue at hand I have resorted to a rather tired cliche, because it's more desirable than focusing on the ugly reality.