TO THINK ONE IS OLD AT FORTY…

Hey, I turned seventy-seven a couple of months ago and the other day a new staff member at one of my gym centers took me for the instructor!! That makes the introduction to a Medium Newsletter from last month even weirder. The writer was feeling that she was getting old, especially as some of the generation before her were passing, friends that she had known, a few of them dear to her. She was dreading losses just as she was about to turn forty.

Well, when I was a child, a fellow little girl I knew from my parents’ get togethers with friends threw herself into a river after she had been molested. About a dozen years later a student in a neighboring college, an acquaintance, died in a motorcycle accident. That was before I turned twenty. The same thing happened to a colleague when I was in a posting in Africa when I was barely over thirty. Should I have said that I was old at that time? How about when the love of my life disappeared because of an aneurism when both of us were fifty?

There are more people in my life who are no longer there than there are new ones. But guess what? I go on a run, gaze up at the trees, at the sky, and simply feel good. One moment I look at myself in the mirror and grimace in disgust but then suddenly look again and smile, putting on a big, rimmed, hat that in my eyes makes me a ‘grande dame.’

There were times when being forty was old, in the sense that the chances of getting to sixty or seventy were rather slim. As late as nineteen hundred, the expected lifespan in this country was less than fifty. That is not the case now. The fastest growing group of people are those over eighty. And, yes, those of us who live longer will suffer seeing friends, family members, acquaintances, and just people we hear about leave before us. However, we should consider that a little over a hundred years ago, parents often had to go through the passing of their own little ones. Yes, in nineteen hundred, in this our country, almost one quarter of children were gone by the time they were five.

Life is beautiful but life is tough. Resilience to the difficulties that we all face is part of the half-filled glass that makes some of us face the day with thanks, even when a certain part of the back might bother us a bit. And consider this, many people do more than well in their forties, fifties, sixties and even later. Just take a look at the leaders we have all over the world.