Know what? The caption is exactly right.
Sissies need not apply to grow old.
Look, growing old is really easy. One just retires, sits,
and grows old without any effort what so ever.
Growing old gracefully, now that requires courage.
Fighting growing old is futile. Fighting to not go into a
sudden downward slope is much better than doing nothing so long as one
understands that the end result is going to be just the same.
But that doesn’t mean one has to surrender without providing
resistance. After all, resistance is how we grow, change, mature.
To face the oncoming coldness of what follows life without
fear demands courage. Not the being dead part; it is the dying part that we
fear. Being dead is unknowable to us in spite of all the egocentric speculation
we sentient creatures have done over the millennia.
Rational thought would tell us that we, our minds, just
stop. That is hard to imaging since we are so used to having our mind do close
at hand all our lives. We have a hard time perceiving and conceiving nothing.
Buddhists talk about the “Good Death,” an easy surrender to
pass over to some other side, state of being, dimension, universe, or
nothingness. This culture rails against being artificially supported by
ventilators, pacemakers, IVs, heart-lung machines “living” in a sort of
twilight of not dead, not alive. We all want a good death.
After passing into “the next room” things are easy.
It’s the grace of dying we need to perfect. It is the effort
needed to stay alive without killing yourself trying to stay alive. It is
taking care of oneself, but not necessarily spending a lot of time in the gym
nor just sitting on one’s butt. Get exercise, but it is not necessary to participate
in Iron Man events.
And don’t dwell on the past. It will only drive you nuts.
The what-could-have-beens and if-only-I-hads never were and never will be.
Fantasies, all of them.
Keep busy. Do things one likes and loves. Continue to grow
and explore and wonder in the face of what is coming.
Now that takes courage.
