Aging — I Go Deeper In Everything In My Life.

As a child, I liked to think. I like to read too. I was too aware, and that made me feel everything from a depth I couldn’t comprehend. I go back for the answers to everything I couldn’t understand.

As I grow, I still think deeply. I go behind everything I face, see, encounter, and meet to understand the life, decisions, situations, circumstances, actions, choices, and reasons of the people behind it. Life taught me that everything has a reason.

I can feel others’ pain and read their emotions, so living and thinking from somewhere deeper, pain is always nearby.

As I get older, life seems to hurt more when I understand it more deeply. Aging takes me back years, back somewhere deeper and farther, giving me the power to make better decisions.

Aging takes us back to the truth.

It’s not a pretty place for those who don’t want the truth.

Thinking from a distance, thanks to aging, is good and bad. It changes how we think and live because our past is packed with wisdom and knowledge, and for people like me who are aware, there is no limit to what I can offer the younger generation. Thanks to aging, I wake up with wisdom and go back to bed with it.

The kind of wisdom that comes with aging is being ignored. Is it because it comes with the truth? We are dying with our wisdom because the elderly are cast aside like garbage in many areas of our world. Mine too.

Aging comes with the truth and valuable wisdom, the kind that nothing else comes with. A few young people asked me, “Don’t you wish you were young again, because being old is horrible?”

I giggle, then said with deep understanding of life, “hell no. I am glad I am old.”

“Why? Your life is over when you are old,” their curiosity asked.

“Not mine,” I said, smiling. “I am living a different life now from the one I lived when I was young. So being old for me means I have lived the best of my life.”

They stared back at me in confusion, so I elaborated, “Look at the condition of your world. Have any of you examined it from all directions?”

Several sighs later, one of them said, “I see no hope for a better future for me. Housing prices are out of my reach, even if I work for the next twenty years and save everything I earn.”

“You can’t save everything you earned,” another one of them said. “How are you going to live and eat with the high food prices?”

“I can’t find employment that would allow me to move out of my parents’ home, and I owe a lot of student loans,” one of them shared.

“I have to share rent with people I don’t know or like if I want to move out of my parents’ home, and I, too, owe student loans,” someone else said.

“I have to take a pay cut and work in a field I didn’t go to college for. I can’t repay my student loans with what they are paying me.”

“So, we’re doomed,” someone said.

“Things are going to get better,” someone encourages.

“It better be!” one of them cried out. “Because if it doesn’t, I am going to kill myself!”

“It will get better!” she encourages, with fear in her eyes.

“God, I hope so,” I moan, with a lot of painful, deep understanding of the history and knowledge of living in hell. Aging with too much knowledge hurts. That’s one of the downsides, having all of this knowledge that could better life, living, and our world, and no one to pass it on to for a better tomorrow.

Young me can’t survive in this world now. Too much cruelty is in it.

Young or old, life hurts from different directions and angles. I am still happy I am old, because I can’t survive in this hopeless world with the ambition I had when I was young. The fight for life is ten times more painful now than when I was young.

My daughter is an NP and has to have three jobs just to pay the mortgage and other bills. She has only one child. My other daughter has two jobs while in college to be a Nurse.

Her husband has to work longer hours to pay rent, car note, and other bills. They have no children, and with what is going on in our world now, they don’t think they will be able to afford children.

Am I supposed to be sorry I am old? Hell no.

I am healthy, am taking nothing, not even supplements, and am close to sixty. Whenever hell visits, I find a healthy way to handle it. My only regret is to die and leave children and grandchildren in such a cruel world.

But by giving them my wisdom, they will navigate it along with the knowledge and common sense I share.

For most of us old folks, our legacy isn’t the material possessions we left behind, but the kindness, understanding, and wisdom we share, and the way we live.

Are you glad you are old?

Thank you for reading this piece. I hope you enjoyed it.