When I was young, my mother used to tell me that I was wishing my life away because I always wanted to be older. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be older, I wanted the privileges that went along with being older. When I was twelve, I wanted to be thirteen so that I could be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be twenty-one so that I could get a driver’s license and vote. During …
So many times in a person’s life, we think if we had it to do over again, we would have done it differently. But, would we have? Dr. Heideggar’s Experiment, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, explores the premise that, given the opportunity to roll back the years and become better humans, we would not do so. As we were in our youth, we would revert to type and repeat our mistakes, not having learned a single thing. Dr. Heideggar …
From time to time I have written about the positive aspects of aging. I have said, and still believe, that I have more liberties now than I ever had when I was young. At my age, I can say and do almost anything and people will just smile and let me be, probably thinking that they shouldn’t argue with me because I have one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in the grave and I can’t last …
Many years ago, I read a book about people going through the aging process in reverse. The author posed the concept of people living and dying in reverse order of what we know as the life cycle. His theory was that we have all this energy when we’re very young and, as we get older, we tire more easily and all the wisdom we’ve acquired is wasted because we can’t do much with it. Now comes a different theory and …
I’ve always wondered how we’re going to survive as a species if we keep killing off our enemies and they keep killing us. I’ve wondered how our planet is going to survive the abuses we wreak on it like the fracking that is slowly causing our land to open up, engulfing property and lives in newly created vast sinkholes. And I keep thinking how our overindustrialized cities are putting such hardship on our planet and depleting our natural resources. And …
There have been so many times when I’ve asked someone about their relationships, the people in their life, a time in their life, or a situation, that I hear the words, “I could write a book about that” and when I ask why they don’t, they give all kinds of excuses for why they don’t or why they haven’t. The excuses range from not having enough time, not being good at writing, not being good at grammar, not, not, not …
Over the last several years, there has been a great emphasis on how scientists are on the threshold of discovering a way for us to live to 150. For so many reasons, this sends chills down my spine. In addition to new health problems associated with old age, there is the matter of one’s career. Don’t, for a minute, think that Social Security will go on supporting us for an additional eighty-five years if we really are living to the …
What happened to the women who used to be sex symbols or the porn stars who used to be in such demand? Many of the women who became sex symbols in motion pictures faded into oblivion after they got too old to play the dewy ingenue. Some of the motion picture sex symbols developed their acting skills after they could no longer play women in their twenties, but most of them disappeared from the scene entirely after they were replaced …
Just about everyone these days has come to the conclusion that all politicians are liars. Some have even been called serial liars, as if that separates them from the regular, daily lies that other politicians tell. I’m not defending the lies that politicians tell but I’m wondering if we hold them to a different standard than the unintentional lies that the rest of us tell. I’m saying that many of our lies are unintentional because we have faulty memories rather …
In most countries with a traditional culture, old people are respected and honored for their wisdom. In the United States, we tend to see them as old, doddering fools whose best years are behind them and who are just taking up time and space, waiting for the grim reaper to take them. But worst of all is that for so many people, their thinking gets fuzzy and they get mentally lazy. Doctors keep telling us that as we get older, …