{"id":7092,"date":"2022-10-14T10:28:50","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T14:28:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=7092"},"modified":"2022-10-14T10:28:50","modified_gmt":"2022-10-14T14:28:50","slug":"is-old-age-overrated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2022\/10\/is-old-age-overrated\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Old Age Overrated?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, that\u2019s a joke. It has to be, in a culture where most people expect the worst of their later years. But that wasn\u2019t me. I launched myself into my 70s and 80s with gusto. Lately, though, I\u2019ve been wondering whether I overrated this phase of life. <\/span><\/p>\n

What started me wondering was a friend of mine who seldom complains. She\u2019s nearing 90 and on track to become a centenarian, like the women in an earlier generation of her family. She seemed to thrive on growing older. <\/span><\/p>\n

But recently she\u2019s begun to have problems with her vision, and her prodigious energy isn\u2019t what it was. Also, she and I just lost a good friend. The other day, she quoted Bette Davis, who famously said, \u201cOld age ain\u2019t no place for sissies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

When we had this conversation, we were sitting in one of our retirement community\u2019s restaurants with another resident\u2014for her privacy, I\u2019ll call her Ann.<\/span><\/p>\n

We wandered onto the topic of the restaurant\u2019s generous buffet, which it dropped several years ago for financial reasons. When I said how much I missed it, Ann shared her philosophy. <\/span><\/p>\n

She was grateful, she said, for the chance she\u2019d had to enjoy the buffet while it lasted, but it was gone, and there were other things to enjoy. <\/span><\/p>\n

That seems like a good way to think about our friend who died: we can be grateful we knew him for as long as we did. <\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s harder to feel gratitude for physical abilities we used to have that are now waning, but worth making the effort, I think. Back trouble prevents me from going on the long walks I used to love, but I can be grateful for all the walks I did take, and I can focus on the pleasure I get from shorter excursions now. <\/span><\/p>\n

Old age is what it is\u2014like every other phase of life, it\u2019s a mixed blessing. But it\u2019s also what we make of it. We can underrate it or overrate it\u2014or just try to go with the flow.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, that\u2019s a joke. It has to be, in a culture where most people expect the worst of their later years. But that wasn\u2019t me. I launched myself into my 70s and 80s with gusto. Lately, though, I\u2019ve been wondering…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Is Old Age Overrated?<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7093,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-voices-views"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"","source_text":"","source_url":""},"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7092"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7094,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7092\/revisions\/7094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}