With barely ten days to go before reaching the advanced age of 89, we have the urge to express our personal perspective on Humanity’s aging process. We find it convenient to employ the analogous phenomenon of agriculture.
Accordingly, we would conveniently describe the universal process of human life as a dynamic process, proceeding from fertilized seed through the sprouting and fast-growing stage, followed by its floral maturity and,hopefully, harvest. The scheduled process of Man’s life and development is analogically similar: fertilization, development, maturity, and, hopefully, harvest.
In the empirically nuanced life sequence of the planet’s human sapient species, there are predictable reactions, rational and emotional, to the process, which vary with the specific stage of development and its relevant reaction.
It is common and expected for the individual in his evolving process to react with personal pride regarding the stages of his increasing physical and intellectual changes from early childhood to adulthood, and to mourn their decline as he proceeds to older stages of life, which feature physical decline and, at times, decline in cognitive abilities.
To affirm the changing sentiments regarding the increase and thereafter the slow and steady decline of physical capabilities, populist society, most especially the advertising and entertainment industries, consistently instill and portray the impression that the worth and significance of the individual is based upon his appearance and physical capabilities. It is noteworthy, thematically, to note that there is, conversely, scant promotion of the classically proven, invaluable elements of internal growth or intellectual advancement. The latter purpose does not market clothes, sports equipment, running shoes, exercise equipment, and the like. By contrast, libraries, book stores, art galleries, and museums are not popular subjects for dramatic and compelling sales commercials. The common predilection for artificiality appears to be ubiquitous and ever-present.
The net result is the universal worship of the ethereal and insubstantial, and a neglect of the valuable and existentially humanistic and fruitful phenomena of which the human mind is capable.
Thus, when physical prowess and capability decline, the populist individual. understandably feels worthless by simultaneous degrees, until he reaches an infirm old age; for such individuals, “aging” empirically constitutes a diagnosably fatal disease.
To us and many contemplative others, life is more than celebrated motion or physical capability. Inarguably, physical decline, painful joints, and other physical concomitants of old age are disappointing, even frustrating; however, old age has a potentially generous harvest of desirable fruits that may compensate for the empirical frailty. Those who have discovered this special elixir are immune to the “disease” of old age and are capable of experiencing the admittedly uncomfortable period as a unique opportunity for a contemplative and life-nourishing harvest.
A mature perception of life and the environment is readily available to the contemplative individual who has beneficially chosen to include in his life, avenues of accumulated personal understanding, through empirical experience and, particularly through elective engagement in literature, the humanities, and the eternally available cornicipia of sources of potential human advancement..
After a lifetime of humanistic advancement, fortunate older homo sapiens like us can rationalize his painful joints by the invaluable pleasure of ultimate understanding of the course of his life in the context of its temporal circumstances; the latter, an incomparable strength, and a truly bountiful harvest.
-p.
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