Rule 1 Don’t chide yourself for getting
old when you forget names or things.
Rule 2 Don’t pigeonhole how you
must present yourself.
Rule 3 Remember you can still be
bold, spontaneous and unpredictable .
Rule 4 It is Okay to put
yourself first.
Rule 5 Allow yourself to make
mistakes or erroneous judgments.
Rule 6 Don’t fret when things are not
perfect. If things must go wrong, they will.
I like to keep
an open mind in every situation but some previous experience might have become
so ingrained in my head that I cannot break out of certain thinking and
operating mode. I have to resign to the fact that age has something to do with
it. I must say age creeps up on you in various forms.
Recently, I
travelled to London with my elder daughter who is in her mid- 20s. I realized
that I had become such a worrier indeed. When we arrived at the local airport
to catch the domestic flight, the queue was surprisingly long. I became rattled while my travelling
companion was steady and calm. All we wanted to do was drop our bags when we
had already printed out our boarding passes. At 6a.m., there was nothing we
could do but to wait in the only queue there was for the airline that we were travelling with . About five to ten minutes to boarding
time, the airline staff asked the passengers who were on our flight to move to
certain counters, it was only then things started to move. I was anxious that
the flight might be delayed and we would not make it in time for our connecting flight. At the check-in
counter, I asked if the attendant
could make sure that our luggage
would make it to our connecting
flight as the transit time between
the two flights was barely an hour. It had happened to me that the luggage did
not follow through when the transit time was longer than what we had this time.
The attendant cleverly responded that she would not be able to ensure that the
bags would make it to the connecting flight but she could try. I then saw that she had placed a red
ticket with the words ‘hot transfer’ to my suitcase before she sent it
off. I have no idea if she would
have done that if I had not voiced my concern. When I was young, I was such a laid back person so
much so that on reflection, I appeared to be sleeping walking through my varsity
days. I believe age and the legal practice must have made me what I am now. I
do not know how I have become somewhat a person who tries to prevent things
going wrong and I have a tendency to
anticipate that things might not go as planned. I have become the
pessimist that I have avoided to be.
It is not a big
deal with luggage, it is just a bit of inconvenience if our luggage do not
arrive in time. Why couldn’t I be more relaxed when I was just about to embark
on my vacation? I generally do not
like to micromanage a process as I like to give a free hand to others just as I
want to be given a free hand to handle a task. However I find that with or
without automation, there is a constant need to get involved with the process of achieving a certain result if
it is a matter of urgency particularly so in the present era when everyone is
distracted and reliant on automation.
Helen Walmsley-Johnson feels
strongly about raising the profile of the middle- aged and she is a freelance writer and the author of the Guardian's style column, ' The Vintage Years'. click
Thanks to the wide web world, she managed to use the social media
to raise her profile as the way
she used it ‘ became more personalized and more a way of keeping up with
what was relevant' to her future plans. She used it to build a
network of like-minded people. According to her ,‘It solves the problem of where you find
other people like yourself to ‘talk ‘ to when you live alone.’ For
her, social media has
really come into its own because as her real- life social universe shrank, her
virtual one grew and became a vital contact with an outside world she often
didn’t feel like facing.
I stumbled upon Helen Walmsley-Johnson's book when some of my secondary schoolmates were organizing a
reunion dinner with a view to celebrate their 60th birthday and the term " vintage years" came to mind. Thanks to technology, I googled and found that the term 'vintage years ' has already been coined to describe the senior years.
Walmsley-Johnson writes in
her memoir entitled ‘ The Invisible Woman Taking on the Vintage Years’ ,
“ Age, the
traitor, crept up on me. For a very long time it seemed as though nothing
changed and I might remain in my heyday forever after all, but then , quite
suddenly , things began to creak and fall apart, like kitchen appliances before
Christmas. Which bits of me had been physically where became more of an
abstract memory; as did their size, shape and the existence of clothes that
fitted properly. In some ways it was easier for me, as a woman, to acknowledge
the onset of natural decay and disintegration because biology conveniently
provided a few helpful markers, large arranged around the business of
procreation and therefore largely to do with hormones. Men- and I think most
women think this –seem to get off quite lightly with a smattering of relatively
minor stuff. Hormones play their part here too, but the general perception
remains that men improve with age
while women start to crumple up like Dracula on a sunny spring day. For the
most part men seem to weather the years in a pleasantly worn and crinkly way,
like a comfortable old sweater, but whatever happens to the exterior there is
still the younger man, just there, twinkling away behind the eyes.
Traces of a younger self still reside in every middle-aged person, of course. ......’
Traces of a younger self still reside in every middle-aged person, of course. ......’
I definitely
resonate with most of
Walmsley-Johnson’s musings and here is another example .
London |
Motherhood is only part of who I am but it is a
big part and it’s hard to put your heart and soul into nurturing something and
then let it go……’
Walmsley also writes this :
‘ In all this
mountain of quandary and Younger Me-inspired daily torment, there is one other
thing that I can’t work out at all, or rather I can but I don’t like to admit
to it: why does the sight of the young and carefree provoke a funny feeling
around my heart and an urgent need to weep gently into my coffee? I ‘ve been
feeling that for a while, I just wasn’t sure what it was –I thought it was
hormones or panic. Now I know it’s a mixture of all sorts of things, including
happiness, regret, envy and wonderment. The young take their youth so much for
granted and , bless them, they don’t know what they’ve got. Then they can’t
imagine a time when they won’t have it or when they’ll be grateful they used to
have it because others in their heat of life’s race didn’t pass the 100-metre
flag. No wonder I’m surprised by photographs of a Younger Me—I’m still here
after all, at an age I couldn’t imagine myself being when I was 30. I can
uselessly speculate that perhaps I should have been less susceptible to flattery, less eager to please or
less willing to put up with the unacceptable because it was the only thing I
knew…but in that not-so –distant past, what a girl looked like was almost more
important than anything else so I sued what I had to get me where I wanted to
be and that’s why it’s so hard to let go.
Now,
at a time when we should be feeling more comfortable and confident in our own
skin, what seems to matter most is not how pretty we are but how young we look,
prettiness can be added later. Like icing a plain and ordinary cake, we can
have every crevice filled , frozen and lifted. We can have our eyelashes
extended, our brows tattooed, our lips permanently lipsticked, our hair
lengthened, shortened or augmented. ……..’
Walmsley-Johnson described the woman
who had the most remarked upon and admired facelifts of the last decade when
she saw her leaving the room.
‘ Or it was
until she stood up to leave the room- because there is no surgery ( at the
moment) to make you move like the 30-year-old you’re pretending to be. Her
posture and movement revealed her as the 66-year-old she was .’
It is natural
that we are all afraid of losing our looks.
‘Half of us are worried about
what’s coming (or going) while the other half have experienced it already and
had their worst fears confirmed, apparently. But who says it has to be a bad
thing? The more we worry , the more it becomes a self-fulflling prophecy. The
more we worry, the more we erode our confidence and self- esteem; and the more
we do this, the more we fade from public view because we accept a biased and
arbitrary judgment about our physical currency once we pass 50. And so it
continues. But now more than ever, it’s the person inside who’s important and
becomes more so as time passes. Whatever magazine, films, advertisers and the
media preach at us about doing all we can and more to maintain an increasingly
generic ‘beauty’ (doesn’t everyone look more or less the same when they’re
enhanced’?) it is always that unique inner person who makes us who we are, even
as the outside gets crow’s feet, uneven eye brows and age spots.’
As we age,
we have to accept that there will
be physical and physiological changes
but I believe that our cores ultimately remain the same and we will
continue to evolve as we endeavour to improve our cores and adapt to our constant changing self and the environment . I believe
when you ask a senior woman if she would actually want to be young again, I am
not sure if they want to go through all that pains of becoming grown-ups.
Meanwhile I shall endorse what Helen Walmsley-
Johnson writes in her introduction :
The term ‘age appropriate’ What is that
?
‘Old age is no
place for sissies’ --Bette Davis
Soldier on….
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