Nearing Age 70: Some Thoughts

I have a birthday coming up in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be 70 years old. You think more about the age you've reached when it's one of these round-number milestones.

It doesn't seem possible. Can there be some mistake? To convince myself, I had to do the mental math, subtracting the year I was born from the current year. Yup, 70. No mistake.

I don't feel any different than when I was 20. But everybody says that. There's something that never changes, your inner feeling of self, maybe. Hard to explain.

And you want to say, How did I get to be this age? Well, of course, the seconds and the minutes tick away and become hours, days, weeks, months, years. Tick, tick, we're all getting there. It's just that when you're young you can't visualize yourself as old. Once, when I was young—I'm only sure it was younger than age 12—I wondered if I would live to see the year 2000. You never realize you are going to be old until one day you are. And maybe not even then.

An uncle of mine once said, Life is a cruel joke, you just get old and have aches and pains. My sister, eternally an optimist—you know, one of those "the-glass-is-half-full" types--had no sympathy or understanding for how our uncle could say that. I understand it, even though I am not (yet) too seriously wracked by aches and pains. (I could be either more or less healthy than I am, although illness is not the sole province of the older.) I think that a reflective person can't help but say, What's it all about? I have to add that I have some notion of the fact that some people's religious faith gives them comfort in the form of an answer to some of these questions about "the meaning of life"—but it's been a question for many of the more thoughtful persons since Mankind began.

Some people say there's a good side to getting older. Maybe even beyond being able to retire and so not have to get up in the morning, get dressed, and go out into the cold to get to work; and becoming eligible for Medicare, which is wonderful because it goes a long way toward paying your medical bills.

They say that you get more content, more comfortable with who you are, more comfortable in your skin, so to speak. Yes, I think it's true. It's probably very different from a lot of the angst that we all go through when we're teen-agers.

There's the matter of regrets. There's probably no one who does not have at least some little regret about something done or not done in the past of their life. And, again if you're an introspective type, you might spend some thought on thinking about what might have happened, where you might be now, if you had done that rather than this.

Of course they say that it's not good to have regrets nor to think about what might have been: they're not productive thoughts. That may be true: you only upset yourself, wishing you could go back to some earlier time and do it differently.

But for every choice you might have made differently, you would have made yourself a different person. If you're content with who and what you are, you might not like one of those alternative paths your life would have taken, just because you'd be someone else now.

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein