With barely ten days to go before we attain the advanced age of 89, we seem to have the urge to express our personal perspective on Humanity’s aging process. We find it convenient to employ the analogous dynamics of developing 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, its harvest. The growth process of Man’s life and development is analogically similar: fertilization, development, maturity, and, hopefully, harvest. In the 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 personally relevant reaction.
It is common and expected for the individual in this evolving process to react with personal pride regarding those stages of his increasing physical and intellectual changes from early childhood to adulthood, and mourn their decline as he proceeds to older stages of life, which present physical decline.
To exacerbate the reactive sentiments relative to the increase, and thereafter, the slow and steady decline, of physical capabilities, populist society, most especially the advertising and entertainment industries, daily instill and portray the impression that the worth and significance of the individual is founded upon his appearance and physical capabilities. It is thematically useful to note that there is, conversely, scant promotion of the classically proven, invaluable elements of internal growth and intellectual advancement. The latter, unprofitably, 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 declining degrees, until he reaches an infirm old age; for such individuals, “aging” is empirically identical to a diagnosable disease.
To ourselves and countless contemplative others, life has more to offer than the elements of celebrated motion or physical capability. Inarguably, physical decline, painful joints, and the other physical concomitants of old age are disappointing, even frustrating; however, old age, valuably, has a potentially generous harvest of desirable fruits that may compensate for the empirical frailty. Those who have discovered the 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, notably, by way of elective engagement in literature, the humanities, and the eternally available cornicipia of sources of potential human advancement..
After a lifetime of humanistic advancement, fortunate elders of the species, homo sapiens, can, as we, rationalize their painful joints by the invaluable pleasure of an ultimate understanding of their life in the context of its temporal circumstances; the latter, an incomparable resource, and a truly bountiful harvest.
-p.
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