WANT SUCCESS IN OLD AGE? START YOUNG

You’d think given all the time we have to prepare for old age we’d be ready for it when it comes. Nope. Sometimes on a perfectly lovely day as the sun splashes its’ golden beams upon me, I suddenly picture myself really old.  My voice is weak and my hands unsteady.  I am so wrinkled there is no place for the wrinkles to go so they sink down into me like quicksand.  Perhaps I am shuffling around a nursing home.  When I get that far into the vision, I force myself to STOP thinking. 

Unless one has Alzheimer’s, I cannot imagine a worse torture.  If you must be cared for by strangers, not realizing who or where you are is a wonderful state to be in.  I visited a facility once where an elderly man kept rushing to the front door and opened it excitedly.  Each time, he asked, “Is my son here yet?”  He had done this for 7 years.  His son had never visited, yet he still opened that door with an exuberant sense of HOPE!

Without hope we hang ourselves or shoot others.  Without hope we have nothing to lose.  With nothing to lose we are willing to lose everything.  Reincarnation, absolving our sins in some confessional or believing we’ll be one of the 144,000 people taken up during ‘The Rapture’ gives millions hope.  Not me.  I have always found it in the kindness of strangers. 

The Tao says our spirituality, “is something that otherwise cannot be discussed in words.”  While I believe in a higher power, I would never presume to tell an Afghani that Christ is greater than Allah or suggest to a Native American that Buddha trumps the Great Spirit.  That would be an insult to God.

Teddy Roosevelt was right: “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”  We all need hope, but as time passes, it gets harder to hold onto it.  My personal hopes for my old age?  My kids will still visit.  I’ll still be sleeping in my own bed.  And when my glasses can no longer help me see, some high school kid will volunteer to read to me every afternoon after school.  Afterwards, I’ll regale them with stories over a plate of cookies.  Is there a greater calling for either of us?