12 June 2010

All my life I've asked the older folks two questions:  "When do you reach middle age, and when does old age begin?"  I've never gotten a satisfactory answer.  However, having arrived at both of those milestones, I can now answer my own questions.

Middle age for me happened at 49.  It was then that I needed reading glasses.  It was then that I found myself walking around to the gate instead of climbing over the fence.

I have now arrived at old age—63.  If I try to run, I look like an old man.  I'm starting to stumble like my father.  I think I've mellowed.  The truck driver who delivered Adam's pivots referred to me as "that old guy," and "a tough old bird."  I have a prosthetic hip.  Every male Kerns who was a near relative either died at 63 or needed a heart operation.

I am now officially old.  As such I need not feel driven, nor guilty when I don't accomplish as much as I used to.  If I want to be slower and enjoy the journey, that's all right.  From here on out I'm not doing deadlines unless absolutely necessary.  If I don't want to participate in an activity I can decline.

I was a kid for 19 years.  I was young for the next 30.  I spent 14 years in middle age.  I should now have another 20 or 30  years in which to experience old age.  I intend to enjoy those years.  I've enjoyed all of the preceding years except my late teenage years, and at the time I really wasn't aware that I wasn't enjoying those.  I wouldn't want to go back and relive any period of my life.  I'm looking forward to the future, and am excited to see what it brings.  I know that I can handle whatever the future deals me, as long as the Lord is with me, and as long as I keep my attitudes positive.

I don't dread death in the slightest degree.  I look forward to it.  The only thing about death that makes me at all nervous is the possible pain that might precede it.  I expect the end result of the death experience to be glorious, and a thing to be eagerly anticipated.  I expect life from that point on to be so incredibly wonderful that my mortal mind is not capable of comprehending it.

(Postscript, 3 December 2019:  I wish to amend the foregoing.  Old age actually happened to me at age 69.  I felt some rather dramatic and surprising physical changes in the spring of 2016.)