Don't you ever feel like sometimes the world is moving without you? As I age, I will find that I feel so totally out of it between the music, the throw-a-way generation, the foul language that if I had said out loud when I was a teen I would have been thrown in a wall and grounded or had my mouth washed out with soap, the out of control youth who have no respect for anyone or anything.
Then I remember. The world is moving ahead and still revolving around the sun. A favorite author of mine (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) wrote the following in "Memories of My Melancholy Whore":
The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia........I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.
Toward the end of the book, he quotes from "The Ides of March" (a quote that that author attributed to Julius Caesar):
In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are."
I have never had a problem getting older. I feel young in my heart. To me aging is a state of mind. Is aging gracefully just a matter of self esteem and another type of personal growth on the timeline of a life? Our years, our lines, our scars are part of who we are. I actually wouldn't trade any part of my life and I am looking forward to attending my grandchildren's weddings. I am what I believe I am and that is reflected in those I love.
Now to just get rid of all the crap that is thrown at me.
