To Age With Grace -- Something To Strive For

by Johnny Gunn

Age is nothing we can run from despite all the claims one might find in various advertising outlets. There are no creams, diets, exercise plans, or surgeries that will stop the aging process, and for a thinking person this is simply a given. It’s how we look at the process that sets one person apart from another, that is, one aging with grace, another desperately fighting for youth.

For most things, alive or not, age creeps up, smites, and ventures on to its next victim. Our bodies fail us, our eyesight fuzzes off somewhere, hearing becomes difficult, and worst of all, our memory just eludes us. Age! It’s wonderful. Some of us grow old with no grace whatsoever, while others it seems, take forever to start showing the signs of years.

In the rest of nature, we are more likely to find what appears to be graceful aging running rampant. Trees become full and expansive the older they get, some like Redwoods and Giant Sequoia become the most graceful and beautiful at the end of their lives. Bears and deer and elk and ... well, most in nature, age naturally. It’s only the human that seems to feel a need to prolong youth.

When a roadway begins to age, it becomes an ugly fairway, filled with potholes and rotten asphalt, but when a wooden structure begins to age, it can become even more attractive. I live in the high mountain desert where humidity is rarely even mentioned more or less felt. Because of that, natural wood ages with gorgeous results. Ancient barns are coveted by artists for their wooden planks. That weathered timber can be turned into wonderful fine art frames, even sculpture.

The scourge of those who will follow us in the next several hundred years will be our land fill garbage pits. Millions of plastic diapers that won’t rot away. Millions of plastic cell phones, and of course all those automobile parts that are now plastic. Steel will at least either rust to dust, or be recycled. What happens in most land fill dumps could be considered absolute graceless aging.

It would be interesting to be around several thousand years from now when some archeologist determines that plastic cell phones and well used Pampers were part of the religious process of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Me? I’ve decided that I want to grow old with the grace of the trees. Not to live longer than my allotted time, but rather to use my allotted time to its fullest. My beard, once a dark red, is now white, many of my muscles have slacked some, and my eyes and mouth are surrounded by what I prefer calling laugh lines or crow's feet, but only the mirror tells me this, not the heart. I’m an older person, I’ll continue to get older as the days and weeks and months and years pile up, and I’m fully aware there is no such thing as a cure for aging.

While neighborhoods slip from prime, cars rust, and streets rot away to become crazy quilt pot hole zones, I plan to enjoy every new thing I learn from the process.

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