Growing older feels like time is catching up with me

Dear Bloggers,

I was sitting down tonight and my thoughts were about life again and how lucky I should consider myself, I have a great family and the girls are growing up faster as I thought. Even though I am enjoying every moment of all the situations that occur and the things they do discuss with us and the things that keep them busy. But also the music they are listening to (some of the songs I never heard before).

Although it is a widely accepted that, "The older you get, the faster time seems to go." But why should aging have this effect? After all, there is the parallel that says, "Time flies when you are having fun." But as we age, time flies whether we are having fun or not.

Question is of course, what's going on?
I have recently been trying to understand this question, because for the past several years many of my days have been extremely long, yet the years still seem to be accelerating.

To tackle the problem, I did an Internet search to see what others were saying on the subject. Nearly all the returns had to do with parenting. "Oh, they grow up so fast. The days are long, but the years are short." This is perhaps a partial explanation; however, since the questioning started, I figured out that it occurs just as well to people who have no children, it cannot be the whole answer.

Some other comments had to do with getting religion. "I found God at the age of 30 and every day since I have been waiting to go to His kingdom. I am now in my 80s. Oh, the days have been so long, but the years have been so short." Again perhaps a partial explanation; Hmmm....the same things I hear with non believers as believers, it cannot be the whole answer either.

Many comments were also philosophical. They said simply to accept the facts and live each day to the full. Good advice I think, but again no advance in understanding.
 

I then turned to science. I typed in the search words "psychology of time". This turned up hundreds of articles, most of which were very technical, dealing with brain structure and functions, neurotransmitters and the like. To narrow the search, I typed in both "psychology of time" and "days are long". And got nothing at all!

Finally, I decided to sit down somewhere quietly and analyse the matter myself. This turned about to be a wise decision, because I think I found the solution. It's really quite simple. It all has to do with "anticipation" and "retrospection".

Whatever the nature of our individual lives, we all anticipate things that are important to us. Then after they happen, we look back at them. For example, most school children look forward to the long summer vacation, which always seems to be an eternity away. Finally, it arrives. Then, almost before they blink an eye, it's over and they are back in school again.

Progressing from primary school to secondary school is another excruciating anticipation for a youngster, especially if the move is perceived as being an important step away from childhood into adulthood.

And so it goes on and on. When anticipated, each new significant event seems to be extremely far away. However, after the event, we regularly look back and yell out: "Did it really happen that long ago?"

Our first love, our first heartbreak, driving a car, getting a job, marriage, etc. When we look forward, all these milestones seem impossibly far in the future. However once achieved, how quickly they fade away into the past.

The older we get, the more milestones we have to look back on. So the farther and faster they appear to fade away. So if sometimes the clock may seem to have stopped, the calendar always continues racing ahead.

For me, the high point of my life was joining the army and serving as a soldier for my country was teaching me that life was not always fun. And they thought me to be disciplined. I applied for a peace keeping force post early in my career and was trained for special peace tasks. Processing the application took only about three months -- perhaps the longest three months of my life. It seemed more like three years. I was accepted but not sent abroad as the Dutch government decided differently. 

After a while I realized that I should consider myself lucky as I met guys who came back from these scattered countries – I still help some of them with getting their life on track and help them with a listening ear and lend them a hand when they have to make a new start again. the easiest way of living my life, because I am having so much fun.

I of course have had many other milestones in my life, which are all rapidly hurtling away from me. Even the most recent ones already seem to be covered in dust. I am now 46. I don't feel old, but somehow I just can't get my mind around the fact that many of these things already look like ancient history.

If accumulating milestones is truly the secret of the accelerating years, what do we do about it? Basically nothing; we just have to accept it. However, this is not necessarily a negative. True, the good things are coursing away faster and faster into the past. But so are also the not-so-good things.

Whether positive or negative, nothing in life lasts forever, even if it sometimes feels as if it will. We are certain of this because we know even life itself doesn't last forever. We are all born to die. What happens after that is the subject of considerable controversy. But whatever it is, we are certain it is going to happen, and that it will almost certainly be different from whatever we know today.

Since I am now in my fourth decade (I am 46), for me this inevitability will probably occur sometime within the next 30-40 years, and almost certainly within the next 50 years. This seems like a very long time. However, the years are accelerating, so when it does occur my most probable reaction will be: "What! Already!" On the other hand I have done so many fun things in my life. If I would drop dead tomorrow I would call it bad luck for the rest of my family.

Enjoy every day you've got left, you never know what might happen.

The Old Sailor,

Growing Older

Dear Bloggers,


When I was young, 21 was the official age of adulthood. Yes, you could get married before then and young men had to join the military when they reached the age of 18, but that 21st birthday was when the world accepted and recognized you as a grownup.

And I desperately wanted to be a grownup. As I've mentioned here in the past, I was deeply disappointed when I woke on my 21st birthday in 1989, and did not suddenly know the answers to all life's existential questions.
Equally discouraging that day was that I felt no more like an adult than I had the day before.

Although I'd had my own banking account for four years by then, I was angry with myself for still being secretly proud that I knew how to write a check and balance the account each month. By then, I thought, I should be so practiced that it would be no more a big deal than dialing a telephone number.

And even though I had been working all those same four years, I was unhappy that I was afraid of my boss as I had been terrified of my dad all of my younger life. I know that haven't been the sweetest young lad. Grownups didn't feel that way, at least that was what I believed then.

At about that time, when I was buying several drinks one day because having a party was still fun at that age, the cashier held up the vodka I had selected and said, “Honey, you are way too young for this.”

I could feel myself blush, embarrassed because I so wanted to be a grownup and a real grownup had called me out. I still believed then that grownups were always right and I ached for it to be my turn to be right.

It irritated me that whenever I accomplished something new, something real adults seemed to do as a matter of course, my pride in myself overflowed. Booking an airplane trip the first time. Getting my first credit card (very hard for regular “folks” in those days). Registering to vote and then not having a clue what to vote for on election day.

It shouldn't be that way, I thought. I should be as comfortable with myself now, as an adult, as I was with being a child. I never thought then that I was faking being a kid; I just was.

But even getting married when I was 29 seem too grownup for how I felt yet - that I was still pretending to be grown up. But by the time I left my wife for going to sea again a few years later, believe me, I felt plenty grown up.
And that is my point. However much I wished to be an adult at a certain age, it doesn't happen that way. The transition from teenager to adult takes growing into over a period of time.

And now I'm pretty sure that at the other end of life, time is required again to become comfortable in one's old age.
Even if we accept that we've reached the beginning of old age, by 60 or so, many of us are not able anymore to make the internal transition to it than the days we felt like grownups at 21.

I became 45 last year when I first realized I was decades older than everyone, I worked with and translated that into knowing that yes, I really do get old, in fact I already am doing so. And I wondered what it would feel like just as 25 or 30 years earlier I had wondered what being a grownup felt like.

It's taken people around me that have retired nearly 20 years to settle into old age and I'll do it with as many fits and starts as growing into adulthood.
What I first noticed, in the youth of my old age, was that people treated me differently. It probably wasn't but it seemed sudden that at work, I was no longer automatically included when groups of colleagues, all younger now went out for drinks at the end of the day. They somehow forgot to invite the “old”guy.

I knew it was something age-related as, I could no longer keep up with the youngsters. At about the same time, a friend arranged for me to meet a certain women that I admired during the days that I was also single. I was surprised when I talked to her how old he looked; But she was only three years older than me.

More and more frequently, I was happy to stay home on Friday and Saturday evenings. It hadn't been so long before then that I had thought of myself as a social failure without a party on a weekend.



And as I was so angry at age 21 to feel a secret pride in little accomplishments that I believed adults handled with aplomb, now I was annoyed with myself for feeling superior to a couple of older men in my neighborhood who “behaved” much older than I did even though we were born within two or three years of one another. But they had trouble with handling things on a computer. Nowadays I'll ask my daughter to help me with the unknown worlds behind facebook and smart phones.

Curious about what was happening to me and how my life would be different as I got older, I began researching aging. Back then, before the boomers began turning 60, there was almost no popular media about aging that was positive. Mostly they ignored everything about life after 55 or 60.

The amount of information about old age has improved since then (although not necessarily the negative attitudes) I've settled into being older in a way that is similar to having gradually grown into adulthood so long ago.
It took me a very long time to understand that it's a journey getting to old age just as it was getting from childhood to adulthood.

A piece of Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, can never be analyzed because

”...for every time it is read it speaks with a different voice to each individual reader. Indeed, on that same reader it's impact changes with each new reading – and particularly at different phases of his growth into maturity and old age.

“This of course is true only for those who continue to grow old and do not merely sink into the aging process or attempt to delay it.”

I'm working on it, I'm trying.

The Old Sailor,