As I
approach seven decades, I have become much more aware that aging is many
things, an accumulation of changes that happened in quick succession causing
some parts of me to grow while other parts of me decline.
I’ve
become more cognizant of the important matters in my life, which, more and
more, are always things, while, willfully, I am less aware of the
insignificant, which, more and more, are people.
You have
no doubt heard the expression “Age is just a number” is a dumber way of saying
that our sense of spirit, my eternal being, has gotten better and seems to get
better with every passing day.
I think
this change is due largely to my growing and ever-expanding reliance on my
intuition. Unlike the use of my legs or the ability to lift heavy things, my
intuition has gotten better with age, and the more I rely on it, the more
reliable it has become. I feel wiser for using it and I wonder if the use
of our intuition is a natural part of aging. When we are young, for
men anyway, we can rely on our quickness and our strength, as we age, at least
in my case, fast no longer defines me, in fact, I avoid fast things now, they
tire me out. As I said, my terrific strength, built by decades of
manual labor that I hated is far, far less than it
was. Nowadays, before lifting anything seemingly heavy, I have to
ask myself “Is it worth a heart attack?” a real possibility in my
case. Of course, we have to be careful in our use of intuition because as we
age, cognition and emotion impact the decision processes. It's simply a part of
life.
The
older we get our deliberative processes, the ability to critically examine an
issue lessens. That is balanced out by our stability and emotional
processing increases. The bottom line is it all balances out. By relying more
on our stability of emotions and less on our declining deliberative faculties,
the quality of their decisions is significantly improved. As Camus wrote, “To grow old is to move
from passion to compassion.”
