Aging begins at the moment of birth, but it doesn’t really take solid hold for another fifty or sixty years. By then, one has experienced childhood, the teen years, young adulthood, and middle age. These phases erode the sense of invincibility that young people have and replace it with a certain fatalism. The thing is, we fight against the fatalism.
It’s natural that our abilities and capabilities wane as we reach our mid-sixties and beyond. Anyone who claims to be as good a driver at sixty-five as he was at twenty is deluding himself. And anyone who says she can put in the same amount of hours and accomplish the same amount of work without feeling exhausted is also delusional.
Yet, we don’t like to admit that we’re not as sharp, not as much on our game. We prefer to think we’re the exception to the rule and not the example of it.
I was reminded of this recently in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. My significant other is nine years older than I am, and I work hard not to notice the age difference. At the other end of the spectrum, my boss is twenty-eight years younger than I, and I don’t get the impression he grants me the same courtesy. All of a sudden, I feel old.
The benefit of all this is that I can see how I feel with my boss’s behavior and try to moderate my own with Earl. We are all trying the best that we can; we just need to remember that.
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