I want to write about being an elder because I wish someone would have told me what it’s like to be the oldest person in the room. Or what it’s like to look around that room and want to talk to each person there about important things, not just the weather.
What are your dreams? Where would you travel if you could go anywhere?
Sure, I get excited about asking questions like these to people younger than I, but then what would I tell them about aging if they wanted to sit down and read about it?
Since I’ve collected several shelves of books about aging, I decided to pull one off the shelf to see how other people have done it.
The book I chose this time was: “Is It Too Late: Key papers on psychoanalysis About Ageing”. I admit that it’s not exactly on the best seller list. When I opened it up, I noticed that at some point, I had underlined various passages.
Here’s the first one I found on page 81:
“However different the basic psychopathology, the common human experience of ageing itself brings continual shifts and changes, and this feature, I am sure older readers will agree, becomes more marked, more noticeable and more complex, the further on one goes.”
The first thing I noticed was that it’s not my style of writing, although I do love the formality and gravitas of her voice. I almost feel like I’m out walking on an icy sidewalk—I almost completely understand what the writer is saying, and then I lose it, and then I get it again.
Before I fall, I’m going to grab onto my key takeaway from this passage. The writer has pinpointed one reason why it’s so darn hard to write about aging – it keeps changing all the time! And that when you are in your later years, things don’t slow down, but in fact, speed up!
If this author is telling the truth, and I sense she is, this means I’ll never catch up because the changes will keep happening faster and faster the older I get.
Oh well – stay tuned. I’m going to pull out another book and see what I can find. In the meantime, ponder that quote.
