Creaking Knees

It's something to worry about for the rest of your life.

Every year beyond, say, 20, you'll see it. You'll lost a little bit more hair, your metabolism will slow down without telling you, you'll start getting that heart burn (or what you'd hope is just heart burn) more frequently. It's enough to make you lose your mind - which will, on its own, happen eventually.

Everything we do medically is a failure. Nothing can really save us biologically. But the one prospect even more feared than death is getting old. We fear it, misunderstand it, needlessly worry about slipping down the slick hill of time unable to pull ourselves back up out of the mire.

This is, of course, the doomsday version.

Most people claim that the Golden Years are their best. They feel more independent, able to stable, and, thus, more free to live as they would choose. Of course this isn't the picture for everyone, but retirement is what it's supposed to be - you're suddenly free of the responsibilities of life, you hopefully have a decent cash flow, and you're armed with the knowledge and will to go out and truly live.

I see growing old as becoming more and more comfortable with being a child.

We are all, behind the ties and dress skirts, big children. We never escape that segment of our lives simply because its what we remember as the best. We start out with it. We have the most fun possible, and then school starts. Who wouldn't want to hold on to at least the tiniest piece of that lifestyle?

But as we grow older, most of us flip a switch and go from holding on to that small piece, to denying it - to ridiculing the idea of it, to claiming that we would never hold dear such an atrocity. We're more dignified than all that.

For the most part though, we're not. I think it goes back to what I was saying about being alone. When you're all alone - with no audience - don't you feel just a few years younger? If you haven't experienced this phenomenon already, I want you to really think about it the next time you get more than an hour all alone. With the house/apartment empty, no one coming home for hours, aren't you more willing to act like a child? Don't you feel like you've shed a few cumbersome years off your life?

And we do. Strip away the suit and tie, the 9 to 6 job, the law school, the sorority, the pearl necklace, the world traveling, the job hunting - and we end up alone in our rooms ready to hop in our PJs and stay up later than we should to watch SNL. We sing out loud. We dance around to bad 80s music. And you think you're ever going to get more adult-like than you are right now?

The truth is, after we make that switch, to start denying our childness, we end up making another switch somewhere down the line - I would imagine when we start having children of our own and the similarities are right in our faces - to start relishing those childlike qualities. I'm sure when a father reads a story to his son at bedtime, part of him is reading to himself, trying to remember what it was like. Could it ever be that good again? And it can. And as he grows older, he starts to accept more and more the idea of being what he truly is - what we all truly are - a child.

He becomes comfortable letting other people deal with things for him, wearing comfortable clothes in exchange for these terrible dressy rags, spending more leisure time and less worrying about money.

Some people have theorized that life is a timeline that begins at childhood and ends at childhood with this long run of adulthood in the middle. I don't have to repeat the similarities between the very young and the very old, but I think the adulthood in the middle is just denial. We're never really adults. Beyond our social strata (and who came up with this crap anyway?) we act like ourselves. We are loose. Free. We dance. We sing. We're children.

One of my favorite web comics is done by this physics guy that worked for NASA. His comics are very simple and decry the outlook of someone who grew up watching Say Anything. I would try to retell you the particular comic I have in mind for this thought, but retelling comics is impossible. The impact is just lost. So here's a link to it. You go here.

Hope you're having a happy childhood.