When you are young your mind and body are inseparable, the latter just a machine which, without having to think about it, carries out the mind’s wishes. The two are fused together, moving through life as a single unit, a horse and carriage. When we are old the mind and body separate from each other, we are aware of effort in asking the body to do our bidding. Things happen to the body that do not happen to the mind, which can only observe the effects from afar. The two no longer work together, the mind, still apparently young, seeks to do things the body can no longer do, like a driver trying to nurse a worn out car down a highway.
Tag: anxiety
Or knitting
When you have a terminal illness, or are getting very old (same thing), people say you should make the most of the time you have left. But how do you decide, of the thousand and one things you could do, which is the right one? You wouldn’t want to be on your death bed thinking “collecting jam jar labels, that really wasn’t very satisfying”.
Slow moving though
I sometimes call the garden hose the orange-headed long green grass snake because … Summer.
Face seems familiar though
You spend the first half of your life learning thousands of people’s names and the second half gradually forgetting them.
He who laughs last
Laughter is the best medicine if you have something to laugh about and don’t have anything wrong with you.
All my troubles seemed so far away
When you are young you measure time in hours and days. In midlife you think in terms of months and years. Late in life you think at least in decades, and, horrifyingly often, a half century seems like a convenient measurement for events that seem like only yesterday.
Villains of the peace
People we think
are bad people
when we are young
turn out,
when we are old,
to have not been
bad at all, compared
to the really bad people
we met through
the rest of our lives.
Told you I was sick
Old age and
hypochondria
go together like
Steptoe’s
horse and carriage
I should have known better
In later life
you forget the results
of old sporting contests
that once seemed more
important than life and death.
On the road again
A runaway bus with your number on it, a heart attack, a crazed terrorist, a pot falling from a balcony, a cosmic ray hitting a cell nucleus. Will you make it home again from the supermarket?
