Delphic Maxim 113: Accept old age
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
113. Accept old age
Well this is a lovely maxim to write about! Ageing gracefully seems to have been something people have worried about for thousands of years. This maxim that reminds us to accept this inevitable process with grace and good spirits.
The specific challenge of accepting old age is bound up in the way we deal with the idea of mortality. When we’re super young kids, it just doesn’t cross our minds. Then as we get older, we notice older people dying, not because of the sorts of shocks and accidents and things that hit people when they are young, but simply because humans aren’t built to live forever. So there’s a process of dealing with the idea of mortality — and some of us handle that better than others. But I think in the main, we come to accept it.
There’s also the way we deal with the way our bodies change. I’m not suggesting at all that I am ‘old’, but I notice the difference in the way my 33 year old body responds to the stresses I introduce to it — alcohol, late nights, over-eating — than the way my 33 year old body dealt with it. Part of accepting ageing is accepting that you don’t bounce back the way you did. I don’t drink as much as I used to, I eat healthier, I have to exercise more to maintain my fitness. If I exercised when I was 23 as I do now, I would have looked like a super model — but a 33 year old body just isn’t the intensive machine of something younger.
And so it goes. It’s important to remember that old age comes with its own benefits: wisdom, a more developed and richer sense of humour, a wealth of experience to draw on, and the joy and comfort that comes with a stable set of friends and family if we were lucky enough to build that throughout our lives.
Weirdly, for a gay man, I’m not that afraid of ageing. I know that my mind will stay young longer than my body, and that I’ll stay healthy as long as I keep taking relatively good care of myself. And that doesn’t mean not enjoying life, it just means accepting the biological process that ages me, that sees us through life’s fascinating and wonderful changes.
Maybe it’s easier for me because I started going bald around the age of 20. But I don’t see the point in fighting something inevitable. So I accept and embrace old age, whenever it comes.
