Last year I broke my leg climbing down a gully on a story. I have no way to prove this but it felt like it broke easier, took longer to heal, and a younger version of myself probably wouldn’t have slipped in the first place. Yes, I know I’ve been on this planet for eight decades now — nearly a century. Yet this was the first time I felt old.
There is a point everyone reaches when they begin to get their affairs in order. In my opinion the earlier the better. In 1968 I was in my late twenties and preparing to spend several years aboard Atlanta slowly circumnavigating the globe. I might not have come back and being blessed with all that comes with being an Octavian I needed to be prepared. I was fresh out of a relationship that I thought might be the relationship and at that age, for my generation anyway, it seemed like children were no longer in the cards. Given that I might not have come back that became my time to ensure my affairs were in order.
Since then I haven’t really thought about it. Sure enough I occasionally update my will, move money around, or update beneficiaries but that’s maintenance. The time between returning aboard Atlanta and falling into that gully passed one day at a time.
When I was born the average life expectancy for a Canadian man was sixty-two years and today it’s eighty-two. Once you hit thirty or forty you begin saying goodbye to friends faster and faster. I’ve attended more than a few funerals for people I thought considerably younger. But, truth be told, I’ve often felt younger than many acquaintances twenty or thirty years younger than myself. I’m starting to wonder what age really is.
There are broad strokes I’ve noticed through my life. Obviously there are certain things like cancer, dementia, or car accidents that we have little control over. Smoking seems to be the main one: since people stopped smoking seniors no longer look like seniors. Turn on any old movie and you’ll think the sixty year old on screen is played by a seventy year old, then they’ll then turn out to be fifty. Part of it is the way they dress but a much bigger part is smoking. Skin care is another: when I was young we worshipped the sun and even applied tanning-oil rather than sun-block. Moisturizer was unheard of.
The main thing, though, seems to be diet and exercise. You have to keep moving. I’ve often heard it said that after a certain age, about when most professional hockey players either retire or get traded to a non-competitive team, your body just doesn’t work the way it once did. As if eighty comes after thirty and the most productive fifty years of your life, the middle part that lasts longer than the the rest put together, doesn’t exist. The fact of the matter is that you don’t need to continue eating like a teenager and you would have benefitted from a little exercise at that stage in your life too. But we’re not professional hockey players who spend two decades of their life pushing their bodies to the extreme in hopes of a few working years paying for the rest. For most of us it’s a marathon not a sprint and taking the stairs instead of the elevator or the bike instead of the car does wonders. I’m also a firm believer in yoga: it’s important to stretch your body once a day and practice moving with finesse. Your body isn’t held up by your skeleton, your skeleton is held up by your musculature. Or at least that’s what I think.
These days they’re talking about radical life extension, a veritable fountain of youth. I’m not sure I believe in that mumbo jumbo but I can see where it comes from. People used to think dogs only lived seven or eight years, then when kibble was invented they started living twice that long. Seniors today often look like the forty-year-olds of my youth. Perhaps age is just a number.
This has caused me some difficulty in the friends department. For many one hangs around with their peers but, to be frank, my peers are often bores. Retirees who have given up on life. I often find myself hanging around with younger people and these days I’m hanging around most with a group of thirty-somethings. But that has it’s drawbacks too because one can gain a lot more wisdom in eight decades than one can in three. I have a lifetime of knowledge Mr. McKool has yet to even live, despite him being a rather wise and interesting individual. And I know people who have lived that lifetime in addition to the one Mr. McKool has lived while learning almost nothing. Peers seem to be a more difficult thing than we’re often lead to believe.
Speaking of the Fountain of Youth, it’s something I’ve spent a not insignificant time thinking about. Readers will know that I have a certain openness to the mystical, though despite this I think it’s more of a fun story than anything plausibly based in reality. But I wonder if the story is not the point.
Narratives control far more of our lives than we often think they do. Another word for narratives are beliefs but I think stories are more accurate than anything particularly logical. What I mean is that we can adhere to a specific set of beliefs but when the chips are down we typically fall back to the stories we believe about situations instead. If I believe that my body starts packing it in at thirty then I’m not very motivated to take care of it or change my habits. If I believe that seniors can no longer learn new things I’m unlikely to keep up with the world around me. But if I believe I can live forever I might actually try.
I often wonder what would happen if I could meet my younger self. If I could meet Ms. Boardman at thirty-five instead of eighty. Surely there would be a romantic attraction, truth be told there may already be, but would we get along as well? Sure young Jules Octavian was fitter, handsomer, and had more stamina. But that was a different stage of life and I have much to celebrate in this other stage. I may have been a beautiful thirty-five year old but that doesn’t mean I can’t also be a beautiful eighty-two year old who enjoys life and retains a spry mind. Indeed much water has passed under the keep since then but in many ways I think I’m actually more myself now than I ever was.
I have a theory, in fact, that in our teens and twenties we learn to please the people around us but our essence stays the same. In fact I remember realizing aboard my circumnavigation that an eight year old version of myself would be far more impressed with thirty-year-old Jules than I would have been at twenty. And I think that progression has just continued. It’s a bit of a Jungian theory, in fairness, but when we’re children we are our purest selves. Then we begin learning how to get along with the world and neglect ourselves for a time. But after a certain age we spend the rest of our years figuring out how to make the two live in harmony. And if anything I think I’d say this is the work of life. Work that these days I must say I’m rather proud of.
-Jules
