The Grandness of Living into your 80s

Hello dear readers. I’m wondering whether you agree with Oliver Sacks’ dad that living into your 80s is the best that life has to offer (I realize that probably none of you are 80+ years old). So it’s kind of a thought experiment:

“My father, who lived to ninety-four, often said that the eighties had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’ too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At eighty, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was forty or sixty. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together. I am looking forward to being eighty.”

by Oliver Sacks

My own thoughts are from the perspective of a 66 year old. While it is true that as one ages there’s a slipping of the type of sharp, quick consciousness one has in their twenties or thirties. But in terms of other ways of thinking, as Oliver Sacks’ dad says — an enlargement — I can get a small sense of what that’s like.

The cliche “don’t sweat the small stuff” comes to mind. The cliche belittles the idea of the expansion of notions, of options, of free-wheeling reveries, of 40 year old songs played anew in one’s head.

Yes there are some aches and pains and, more clinically, a hint of cognitive decline as well as muscle sarcopenia (involuntary loss of skeletal muscle mass and strength) that are the direct results of aging.

I am keenly aware of my increased leisure and freedom though, as Sacks says. Retiring in Bali has given me these two lovely features: leisure, which is enhanced by both the slower pace of living in Bali, as well as being surrounded by a deeply spiritual people. And freedom: to think, and to live, in part due to a more affordable and simplistic lifestyle.

I’d really like to get a sense of how you are tackling the aging process. Here’s a quick form, or even better, leave a comment.

Later,

Neill

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