Going Gentle

It is right that things should fade
That oxygen should draw its electronic debt
In every cell and line of age

It is left to me to say
That I have always loved my different cats
Despite outliving all of them

Memo to the interior designer:
Let the parquet stain grow pale
Grow old along with me
My falling hair will then be less visible

Memo to the exterior designer:
I've come to appreciate
This maturing pain
The sense of loss balanced by forgetfulness

If the guitar were less hollow
The sound would be less sweet
If the sound were less hollow
I would listen harder to my beat

And so my trousers they are rolled
By rhyme to remind me I am old

Football Training

Stand on one foot. Stay immobile if possible for a number of seconds, starting at half a minute. Switch feet. Do it again. Increase the time by another half-minute. Repeat until the successful interval is five minutes long.

Change the surface to a variable, shifty one. A half-inch stack of yoga mats, for example, or a spongy pillow (not too soft). Do it again.

It's supposed to strengthen the stability of the balls of your feet by developing the foot's muscles, ligaments and tendons. It's also supposed to help flat-footed people overcome a serious problem which looms as they age: the problem of losing their balance and spraining, straining or breaking something.

Enjoy. Ow, my feet hurt.

Facelift

I think the reason people get jowly in old age is that as one gets older and forgets to smile, gravity (the quality of being down) takes over. I must remind myself to keep smiling and doing work against the force of gravity.

Not Doing

It's one of those days when you look at your desk and the piles of books and papers and you tell yourself no I'm not doing anymore work. And it's worse than that, it's one of those days when you don't want to do any work but you aren't happy with yourself for it. And it's worse than that, you left the airconditioning on all night and you ache all over and who can you blame for that?

Coffee. Cures all ills.

Foodism

In my father's mouth are many receptors. As he has aged, many of them have closed down and no longer receive guests. Food has to have a stronger flavour to appeal to him. Some basic taste sensations are magnified, their impact carried by simpler substances — salt, sweet. The complex aromas of his earlier years have diminished, undone by time.

It will no doubt be the same for me, as it has been for generation after generation of those under the sun. And I suspect this is why we are often so much less discerning of food when we are young than when we are older.

It's not that the young are less picky, but that their pickiness towards food is in terms of simpler things — texture, colour. When very young, bitterness is poorly tolerated, but sourness is fine. As the palate matures, all kinds of odd flavour sources have to be savoured and analysed — umame, menthol, tannins, vanilla, pink peppercorns, sea salt... — and the tongue is able to feel the difference as it acts as the platform that eventually brings in the powers of the nose.

One day, this is gone, as the palate ages to simplicity. But the memory of taste makes us search for what has been lost, and we have often gained the spending power to go looking for it. Sadly, it is gone forever.

If food is the music of love, then love too may go this way. We play games when younger, like strong sensations when very young, and aim for complex blends when we think we have matured. But at the end, all we need is the simple, direct stuff and the wisdom to appreciate it for what it is. Sometimes, old love is strong but consists of a limited palette: plain affection, basic respect, a sense of humour that will overcome daily difficulties.

Getting old, one should divest; one should become simpler, more appreciative of things. Food is food; love is love; music is music. The last of life is the best of life, because it all heads towards one point, that which keeps us all human and the same — the boundary between sensation and the lack thereof. There is no food beyond that line.

Ageing Population

Last night's reunion dinner was hilarious. It all began when one of my uncles somehow failed to realise that he was a senior citizen. A man of the diving-camping-roughing it out kind, he isn't particularly frail. But he is a septuagenarian. Of course, Eldest Aunt, into her rather vibrant and active 80s, laughed at him with all the aplomb of someone who looks sub-60 and feels even younger (apart from the wisdom of ages). At one point, she made the crack, "So I don't get to go (camping) anymore because you think it's too tough for the old lady eh?"

The discussion meandered through multiple strands of medical lore and the high politics of the Atlantean priesthoods, chiefly because we eventually figured out who his camping partners were. Through it all, I was thinking, "If this is old age, I should be preparing to carry a reasonably high level of physical and mental fitness into my next forty years or so."

Meanwhile, however, I'm nursing some sort of deep tissue upper arm injury. There's a certain point (Eldest Aunt says it's 40) at which the human body naturally develops all kinds of random susceptibilities. Arrhythmias, bad eyesight, odd fluctuations of the senses and the metabolism, that kind of thing. This injury probably comes from acting like you're in your 20s when you are actually a lot older.

I've also been reading a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. He's entertainingly agnostic and one of the most humane writers I know. He writes like Ray Bradbury, but with less of Bradbury's sometimes poisonous sting. I began reading Vonnegut in my teenage years, and books like Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-5 were an integral part of my adolescent experience. It was partly from him that I've developed a remarkable level of sanguinity about my infirmities. They don't matter as long as I'm not a parasite and I can help others be happier than they'd otherwise be.

Infirmity

I will hit the second prime of the decade in a few months' time. And since it is a new year, I have resorted to cataloguing my infirmities for two reasons: primus, in order to make decisions concerning their cure, removal, or amelioration; secundus, in order to chart my progress towards decrepitude, or if this body be indeed a temple of the Holy Spirit, towards dilapidation.

Head: I have always been colour-blind and there is no help for that. My hearing is slightly worse, my eyesight has begun to approach the edge of presbyopia while the astigmatism has made me shortsighted in many environments. Smell is still a good sense, improving with age for some unknown reason. I have occasional tension headaches, with accompanying clenching of the muscles temporalis, which does not help my temper and makes me even more aware of the passing of time.

Upper Limbs: My wrist muscles need more work. I still strain them too easily. The pain from my right shoulder, in particular, tends to create phantom pain in my right wrist. I can no longer differentiate the two. I am beginning to get pains in the joints of the phalanges. The acromoclavicular joint injury I had 25 years ago is still a nagging pain once or twice a year.

Upper Body: The little growth I had, just off the sternum, stabilised years ago. My lungs are clear despite various scares. My back hurts more quickly when I adopt unnatural postures. This is a warning sign. I try to keep flexible.

Lower Body: Things are OK. Despite the many recessive genes I carry, nothing's gone too badly wrong hereabouts. My lower back has a little wear and tear, but less than my upper back. I have a fat butt.

Lower Limbs: These get abused the most. I have tried many kinds of shoes, but the fact remains that I walk too much and I have flat feet. I have had a small fracture or two in the past. I am quite sure that it is well with my soles these days.

Internal Organs: All's well. Brain not so good these days, but guts still functional. Blood has actually improved since the days of my youth.

Integument: Skin as bad as ever, which is to say not so bad. Some coloured spots, but not unusual ones. Hair going slightly grey as the maternal genes dictate. White in some spots which are not open to the public.

Ah well, we all grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Selective Senility

Yes, I'm still a fairly young man. But I was looking at my sister-in-law's profile when I noticed a rather enchanting quote which I shall now reproduce:

God,
Grant me the senility
To forget the people I never liked anyway,
The good fortune
To run into the ones I do,
And the eyesight to tell the difference.

I'm not in favour of real senility, even if selective, but I would like the effects. Thank God, however, that recent instances have shown me that He gives to each of us only as much vision as we need.

The other day, for example, I was at my favourite hangout when some unaccountable reflection caught my eye. I saw a single shrivelled foot peeping out at me from behind the otherwise shuttered dark environs of a pedicurist's. Immediately, I knew it was someone I did not want to meet — and this proved to be true. Up to that point, I hadn't known I could identify this particular old lady from her left foot; in fact, I hadn't known I could identify anyone from either of their feet!

I suppose that it's not so much selective senility but selective perceptivity. As the bandwidth decreases and the processors wear out, what remains should be the most useful stuff — if you could ever know what would be the most useful. Since you can't ever know (even if you could guess), it's good to ask God for His most selective guidance.

Salt and Pepper

Looking into the mirror over the last few days (you need to do that to shave), I've noticed a distinctively salt-and-pepper appearance beginning to develop. I now have sufficient white in my hair so that the stubble looks like markedly heterogeneous. At the same time, an objective count shows that less than 0.1% of the population (yes, I counted more than a thousand hairs, vanity of vanities) has gone white.

But it's good to have more salt, I guess. If you're going to be the salt of the earth, maybe too much pepper is a bad thing. That was the thought that came to me as I heard incoming news from my social aggregator (Wyvernet) about the goings-on at the old place.

You see, they're hosting the local Odyssey of the Mind competition. This year's different though. The seasoned old veteran lady with the mad skillz has been replaced by a team which knows naught about OM set-up. No taped-off areas, no waiting areas, a lack of planning... sigh. It's not that I want to denigrate the place, but two things occur to me at this point.

Firstly, the tacit working knowledge of a place and a system is something that really runs the show. You can lose the old staff but you will also lose the practical working knowledge that they carried in their heads. This will eventually show up if you don't put a plan in place to transmit, record and store it while it's still available.

Secondly, I actually have a citation for my services (as part of a group) to this programme. The whole bunch of us are mostly no longer there. If you're going to get rid of elements in your organisation, it's probably not a good idea to uproot an organ without proper replacement.

Connected with that is the idea of what an organ really is. Some organs are more obvious than others: the liver, the kidneys, these things look like concentrated bundles of stuff. But the skin, the lymph network, these things are distributed organs. If you were to eliminate sizeable chunks of them, you'd die in a most uncomfortable way. Think about what would happen if you lost a third of your skin or a third of your blood vessels, or a third (distributed) of your guts...

So... more salt, a bit less pepper. Life is good.

Information Age

Personally, I think that I experience the greatest discomfort (or sometimes, a frisson of schadenfreude) when watching authority figures talk nonsense in public because information is running ahead of (or has escaped from) them. Sometimes, the old and well-worn (or still well-wearing) opinions of past pundits or an earlier generation of authority figures are trotted out on parade, now woefully inadequate except for a museum.

Yes, people should keep updated at least in the areas they profess to talk about. That's the very least that the information revolution should be good for. I shiver when I look at John McCain's campaign, running as if their boss has not a clue about the nature of the internet or the technology that enables it. It is not good when a maverick boss, one who professes to bring change to an establishment by virtue of his outsider status, proves to be a maverick in terms of being behind the normal curve of information.

I would answer such people by saying that perhaps the answer is not generally (there are some exceptions) to be found in those approaching their 60s or 70s. This is sadly because the information revolution of the 1980s and 1990s came when they were already maturing or happy to be 'matured'. I've seen leaders in their mid to late 40s and 50s totally clueless about information technology and yet acting in the capacity of CEOs and CIOs without missing the missing beats (or even hearing the beat).

It is also tough for those in the 50s, 60s and 70s because most of them missed the neurobiological and cognitive advances of the last decade – or at least they might mouth the words and catchphrases but not have bothered to look at the research in detail. At this point, I will probably be accused of ageist bias.

Well, perhaps. My last memory of my paternal grandfather studying anything was when he was in his 80s. He was reading a book on cloning and the moral issues involved. As a medical doctor who retired at the age of 78, he was astonishingly well-read and could hold his own in conversation about current issues in almost any field which he was interested in. I wish more were like him.

But that brings me to my main point. The key lies in the phrase 'information age'. I've been to libraries where they look at the average copyright date for reference books. The more current that average figure, the more likely the reference section is up to date.

Those who are older need not be disadvantaged. They already have more experience, and all things being equal, that is an advantage. They should probably have developed more wisdom, and all things being equal, that is certainly an advantage. They quite likely have some advantages in resources found in networks, community, material wealth, and so on.

Sadly, not all things are equal. But the library analogy remains useful. More senior members of society can keep themselves up-to-date. They can learn how things work, using the stored experience, wisdom and peer-to-peer networks (and other resources) accumulated over their longer lives. They can keep in touch (even as the peers drop out by attrition). And they can continue to be more productive, by leveraging against these advantages, than many of their juniors.

The point about 'information age' is that your information age need not be as old as your physical or chronological age. Grandpa was doing his own readings and research until the cancer that killed him got to his brain. My grandparents (now sadly all gone) read the newspapers (a main information source) avidly. They saw things happen, they felt the patterns of the world.

There is still plenty of the game to be played, plenty of the race to be run. It isn't over till it's over, and who knows what happens then?