Facing old age.

"It's weird"  I remember an old lady once saying, "I know I am physically old, but deep down inside I still feel like a teenager!!!""

How true those words still ring almost 40 years later. I look in the mirror and see myself and can hardly believe my eyes. Is that vision really me? It's almost like a nightmare. You hope to wake up finding it was all a dream and that you still are that young energetic being of so long ago. Oh, to be young again and run through the fields with bare feet with not a serious problem in the world. The body grows feeble as the years go by but the mind still remains as active and inquisitive as it was in the old days and it takes you to all sorts of places which long since have been out of reach due to the frailty of your physical body. A sort of mind over body.

When I was young.......

I wanted to live for ever. We all do!

Problem is as you grow older, one by one the friends you grew up with start to die die off, and you suddenly realise that a world without these people, who shared the same memories and values as you, really not a very pleasant place to be. The world you grew up in invariably changes as new generations are born and change the world to suit them.

Only the other day I went into a new hair dresser's to have my hair cut. "What way do you want your hair cut? she asked. "Like Liza Minnelli." I responded. "Liza who....?"It was very clear she had never heard of Liza- "you know the daughter of Judy Garland?" Another empty face met me. "God," I thought suddenly feeling very old...."Well, the cut used to be called a "Page" cut" "Page?" she looked even more blank. "Oh, my goodness" I thought to myself "I must be a dinosaur".

Problem is, for every year you dive into old age - more memories are forgotten by the world surrounding you. You find yourself suddenly talking to complete strangers out on the street just because they look remotely like they might be the same age as you. You actively seek your own age group. You gang up with each other- hanging on to memories that we all have in common. You even find yourself hanging out with people you would never have mixed up with when you were younger - just merely because they come from the same generation. And you suddenly find yourself actively seeking long lost friends you haven't seen in decades.

And we all do it. It's only a few days ago a very good friend of mine from my teen years who I haven't seen or heard from for the past 25 years had found this website on the internet and  hastened to write me and e-mail saying "let's get together- before we view the world from beneath the grass!!!!" Like minds think alike. Of course I answered immediately. Funny thing was I had been seeking him via the internet for years!!!!!

So the moral of this little epistle is don't loose touch with the friends and world that you cherished as a youngster. Somehow when you go through your thirties, you become so self centred and inward looking. You build up new relationships, create new relationships, you concentrate on your job and attempt to climb the career ladder at work....and before you know it, you have isolated yourself from all those you so loved when you were young. And all the activities you used to love then somehow have fallen by the wayside too. You  stop taking time to do your hobbies - create a completely new "grown-up" professional life which at the end of the day usually turns out to be so unimportant.  And when you, like me, stop and start to look ahead towards retirement - you suddenly realise how much precious time you have wasted. And how many friends you left by the wayside. And you start to ask yourself- have I got time to do all those things I put off till later.