Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s a character in a Hemmingway novel who is asked how he went broke, and he replied “Gradually then suddenly.” Growing old is like that. At least it’s been like that for me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And I’ve noticed I have it good by comparison with a bunch of my kidhood peers. I still get a lot of complements on how young I look for my age (71). But that might mostly be because of something a shrink I went to once told me, that I “present young”. Mindset does affect appearance. In many ways I still have this inner point of view that I’m a teenager or at best a young adult.<\/p>\n
So this morning at Disney world, as I’m coaxing my stiff body into my clothes for a walk around Saratoga Springs (I did a lot of walking yesterday and I’ll probably do that again today), that I have to realize once again that I’m Not a young adult. I’m an old man. It still mostly doesn’t bother me, or at any rate I can ignore it most of the time. It’s when I can’t that I wish I had my twenty-something body back again. But this morning I had a thought: what if I actually could be transported back into my twenty-something body again, even if just for an hour or two while I stroll around the parks here. Would it be a pleasant couple hours, or would it shock me to actually see how much aging as taken away from my body over the decades, that I haven’t really noticed because it all happened so gradually?<\/em><\/p>\n Maybe its just as well I don’t have that kind of magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Aging sneaks up on you slyly. Unless you have a bad illness that ages you rapidly, or genes that do the same, you hardly ever notice that you’re loosing things like stamina and flexibility. Until you pull a muscle doing something you did a zillion times before and your body didn’t complain about it. There’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[157],"class_list":["post-13585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-the-old-man-chronicles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13586,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13585\/revisions\/13586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}