Going Down The Tubes

Cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town
And they tell him,
Take your time, it won't be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down
--Joni Mitchell, "The Circle Game"

Aging is a strange thing. As Tevya says in "Fiddler on the Roof," looking at his daughters, now  young women--I don't remember growing older; when did they?

People age not in a smooth arc, but in plateaus, stairways going in one direction, down, with landings where you can catch your breath, but always in descent and it's hard going, going down.

Bertrand Russell and others spoke of "The Life Force," which ebbs as we age, and I always understood that as merely testosterone, but it's more. It's cardiac output, muscle mass, oxygen exchange, brain power, memory.

If you are lucky, you play the game with more patience and you get better at it as your timing gets better and you learn to wait for the right moment. 

I never learned that. Haven't really learned much.

Odes have been written about aging with grace, arriving at a better place. People talk about being happy they aren't 18 any more.  I think you must get over that deceit and eventually you realize as stupid as you were, it was better to be young.

Part of the problem of aging is not having a good fight to fight.  This must be what drives Bernie Sanders. He wants to be still aflame, to have meaning left in life. 

Then there are the old warriors, who must look back at all their anger and wonder what they were so worked up about.

Does Gloria Steinem reflect on the battles she fought and think, "Well, I was so right" or does she think, "We were right to demand equal pay and equal access, but, you know, raising a kid would have been just as important" or does she not think about this sort of thing at all?

When Jerry Brown thinks of Linda Ronstadt does he think, "Those were the days" or does he tell himself what he is doing now is just as important?

Do any of us get as excited about anything now as we did then?

Mephistopheles tells Faustus, "There is no greater Hell than remembering happier times," and he may speak for every person locked into the spiral of descent into the infirmity of age.

Part of the funk must have to do with feeling we are no longer in control and no longer relevant. Part may have to do with the frustration of watching our kids or other younger people repeat our mistakes and not being able to do anything about it.

Is there a culture which deals with aging better than ours?  Is there a place where people pass through the decades with increasing satisfaction and pleasure? 

When I was a young doctor, I had a terrible case, a twenty one year old woman who came to the ER a nasty shade of blue, and she proceeded to die over the next four hours despite my inexpert attempts to save her.  At first,  all I could see was the mistakes I had made, but when I presented her case to the sixty and seventy year old physicians on the faculty, they smiled knowingly and shook their heads. "That is what influenza does," they said. "No matter what you had done, her fate was sealed." When I went to the autopsy room and saw her lungs, thick and gelatinous as liver, I knew they were right. 

In that instance, age, experience offered comfort. They knew something because they had seen it before and they knew when it did no good to struggle, when you had to simply say, "It is written." In that instance, the aged were more comfortable. 

My brother told me a joke, when I was in high school, about two bulls standing on a hill, looking over a herd of cows in the glen below, and the young bull says to the old bull, "Let's run down there and get us a few."  The old bull looks at the youngster and says, "Let's walk down and get them all."

I wish that sanguine assessment of the advantage of age were comforting now. Now, it's more like, "Let's see if we can make it down the hill without falling."