Growing up and growing old are two of the most significant experiences and achievements of human consciousness that become more challenging as the aging process gets underway. First, there is the ability to objectively (courtesy of the five senses) perceive the existential, physical nature of everything happening around us in the course of a typical day. Second is the ability to subjectively (courtesy of mind and brain) psychologically experience the range and intensity of feeling, thought, and evaluation that give meaning to all such perceived happenings as we move through the day.
Yet in striving to maintain, if not sharpen, perceptual experiences of the outside world (which I think most older types try to do by keeping the senses alert) many aging individuals tend to psychologically withdraw from keeping up with the frequently changing nature and values of daily ongoing life. They have a tendency to live in the past, finding it easier, and even more meaningful, than modifying or changing the fixed and familiar structure of the mind as new challenging mental attitudes to life present themselves. In fact, they can become irritated by the need to re-think and re-feel their familiar and long-established mindset.
However, it would seem to be pretty well established that in retreating from such new challenges to life’s ongoing processes—thus diminishing the expanding range of consciousness that nature’s old age routine incurs—the will to keep on living is unconsciously weakened.
There’s an old saying, "Keep the Body in motion, and the Mind in action," which obviously is intended to define the best way to keep growing up, rather than growing old.
I was talking in this vein the other day to an elderly man in a local coffee house. He said he had stopped thinking about his daily existence and saw no point in dwelling on events of the past. After all, he said, he was now 75 years of age, an old man. He had few opinions about things anymore and was just growing old, coasting to the end.
There are times when you sense the futility of argument or even discussion, and this was one such time. I just didn’t feel that he would have much interest in my own experience that consciousness, whatever one's age, continues to ask the question: Why and wherefore, to what end? And it would seem that in continuing to live an active life as long as physically possible (I have just had my 94th birthday and I keep away from the armchair) that the mind intensifies its quest and the body pushes one to remain active.
The result? One continues to psychologically grow up. I am talking here from my own experience of aging, as the mental overview of life continues. I must say, the questions were much less frequent and less intense when I was 75.
Two quotations, some 2,500 years apart, come to mind.
“Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom. When the passions have relaxed their hold, you have escaped not from one master, but from many,” said Plato.
Oscar Wilde wrote: “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.”
