Post #29: Ageing (Happy Birthday!)

27 May 2023

It may happen at 40 or 50, or maybe at 60 or 70, but the moment of truth comes for all of us when we must admit to ourselves that the ravages of time cannot be held back or negotiated with any longer. Some keep up the fight for a few years more, in part because they are so disposed, in part because they can, owing to a complex combination of luck and lifestyle; but sooner or later we arrive at the dreaded hour when we must concede defeat and all that remains for us to do is to turn the rout into an orderly retreat.

Seeing it coming is not nice, and the point of no return is sure to be melancholy at best, heartbreaking at worst; yet, oddly, crossing the line may also be liberating, at least so long as one’s health, physical and mental, holds up on the whole. Retirees in their sixties and beyond often report surprisingly high levels of contentment with their lives, though this may depend in part on feeling that their earlier years were reasonably well-spent, perhaps even that they were able to prove themselves at doing what they did before. A measure of material comfort probably helps as well. But the striking fact remains that old age, as hideous as it must look to the young, is not perhaps as bad as all that, or at least, doesn’t have to be.

Lowered expectations are surely a big part of it. We are not made miserable so much by lowly circumstances (unless they are truly desperate) as by the sense that they should be higher—as one is poor not so much on account of one’s modest means as because of one’s unmet needs and wants. “How many things there are that I can do without!” as Socrates is said to have exclaimed as he wandered through the Athenian marketplace (Diogenes Laërtius, Life of Socrates 25), is a cry of freedom and joy, not unhappiness.

To establish that you have indeed arrived at the deteriorating age, there is an easy test: do you ever prefer a more recently taken picture to one taken a few years ago? And for having crossed the point of no return: do you still identify with what you see in the mirror, or is it now a stranger looking back at you? From a Dhammic perspective the latter may not even be a true defeat but rather a step forward, because the identification is itself supposed to be a greater source of suffering than the deterioration.

Perhaps you are not so easily consoled and incline instead to the darker traditional view that a man is irredeemably old at fifty, which was proclaimed in the most mournful tones by Casanova, for instance, who proclaims in his memoirs that until that age Lady Fortuna had always smiled upon and kept faith with him, but afterwards, nevermore. The verdict needs to be put in perspective, however: at fifty, Casanova, like most denizens of his time, had barely any teeth left, and, unlike most of them, had braved no less than eighteen separate courses of the “grand cure,” meaning mercury treatment for venereal disease.

Anyone disposed to take an overly somber view of life in the 21st century may benefit, by way of lightening his mood, from a quick online search about what dental equipment looked like until not so very long ago (pincers) and how recently toothbrushes came into mass use (only after the Second World War, even in the US); or what syphilis does to the human body, how widespread it used to be, and how easily it is treated today if detected in a timely manner; or what it has meant for mankind that smallpox was eradicated forty years ago, a hideously disfiguring disease estimated to have killed perhaps 300 million in the twentieth century alone—thus possibly more than all the wars and dictatorships of that horrible century taken together. The ravages of soldiering and childbearing, so frequently consigning men and women in their primes to the most hellish, lingering deaths, exemplify what the Buddha meant when he imagined the oceans of tears cried by us in our agonized wandering through round after round of Samsara.

Meanwhile, as you read this text over coffee on your problem birthday, there is every chance that you still have all your teeth, or else replacements that can pass for the real thing; that you could not pick out a pockmarked face from a lineup of gruesome medical pictures in sepia; that you would not make the connection between syphilis and mercury, or with the madness it induces; and that you have neither been to war nor seen anyone die in childbirth. All this cannot make the difficulties of aging go away; the wretched possibilities for decay and deterioration remain countless and as cruel as ever; but a bit of historical reframing should still help to put things in perspective, shouldn’t it, and make the added decades appear not quite as Casanova made them out to be (and even he was exaggerating somewhat, since plenty of good things still came to him past fifty too, despite his cries of woe.)

The high Buddhist message of finding your way out of the cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death may seem too remote to you, and the loose talk of making peace with aging too easily spouted to be taken quite seriously. Very well. So let two pragmatic thoughts suffice instead for today. First, no matter how much and with how much cause you may dislike aging, or even hate and resent it, you will never be as young again as you are today, so you might as well enjoy what the day may bring in that spirit. And second, even if arriving at a certain age does not make your heart brim over with gladness and gratitude, would you rather not have arrived, but been cut short on the way? Most human being never did advance as far in years, you know. How can I be so sure? Simple: the majority died, until quite recently, before they reached the end of puberty.

Happy birthday!