Reminder to Self SERIES: You’ve Always Been OLD

Reminder to self: “OLD only has meaning if you say it does.”

My hair is gray now.

My skin is not as supple as it once was.

And my eyesight keeps needing tweaking.

On this last matter, at first it was the silver-sparkled, cat-eye eyeglasses I wore in my early grade school years that garnered me much ridicule back then but appear to have made a comeback in recent years (what the heck?!?!). They’re actually kinda cool now; wish the kids thought so back then.

I also went through the classic black-rimmed eyeglass phase, a frame style which somehow seemed to have aced the test of time. (Amusing to me, since I recall not only myself, but several of the other ‘unfortunate’ boys and girls in grade school like me having white medical tape wrapped around at least one arm of those classic glasses trying to keep them held together enough to make it to dad’s next pay day. As was probably the case for most families where I lived, whenever my mom and dad had to decide what to do about my broken eyeglasses, it was often a choice between food on the table or getting ‘the unfortunate one’ a new pair of eyeglass frames. I didn’t always make the cut, sometimes had to wait a while, but there always seemed to be enough medical tape on hand. How’s that for a silver lining! LOL!)

Next, in my early twenties, it was hard contact lenses that literally deprived my eyes of air and moisture so that whenever I got the slightest speck of dust between my eyeball and the hard lens, it was the physical pain equivalent of fingernails scraping on a chalk board. Gas-permeable, semi-flexible lenses came out years later and only felt marginally better. When specks of dust frequently got caught underneath them, my eyes wouldn’t stop tearing, which made it impossible to get the darn lenses out and would often result in them getting jammed up or down somewhere under my eyelid. By the time soft lenses came along, I said, “Forget it. I’m done.”

Next was laser and cataract surgery in my fifties, which was pretty frickin’ awesome and gave me perfect vision for almost ten years. I’m in to my sixties now, though, and good things don’t often last, so I’m now back again to eyeglasses. This time around, I kinda like them. I even scored a pair that are shaped much like my old black-rimmed frames from grade school but in a sweet blend of denim blue and clear beige; they even have silver sparkles! “What goes around… ”

Lately, I’ve caught myself a time or two (or more, to be honest) thinking or saying, “God! I’m getting old!” The suggestion, of course, is that it’s not a good thing. But I’ve been doing enough spiritual and personal growth work to know that’s a bunch of hogwash.

It was always hard to figure out who Robin Williams really was. In this scene, he’s “old,” but it doesn’t define him; he was just playing a role.

I’m pretty frickin’ lucky to be alive. So, to counter those disparaging thoughts, I’ve been working at raising my awareness of the label I’m pinning on myself when I call myself “old” and how harmful that can be (much like kids labeling one another hurtful names in the school yard–like ‘fatso’ and ‘4 eyes’ and ‘faggot’). When those words enter my thoughts, I do an auto-correct as soon as possible and diminish the value of that self-condemnation statement with this sentiment:

“I’m not GETTING old, I’ve ALWAYS been old! Once I was six years OLD; then 16 and 46 years OLD; and now I’m 60-something years OLD.

You don’t see “old people” listed here, do ya’? I rest my case. 😉

Age may mean something in this world where time holds great importance to the masses (i.e., “really old” is cool if you’re talking about dinosaur bones but not cool if you’re talking about people), but the longer I’ve been on this planet, the less I automatically align with the masses… I tend to go my own way. Truth be told, in the grander scheme of things, age and time are just arbitrary expressions of measurement that satisfy our need to label things, but means little else out there in the universe.

On planet Earth where we humans attempt to communicate in the limited ways we do, I’ve always been some measurement of “old.” And that’s where its meaning ends.