A feeling I have had as well. My grandfather (my mother’s father) completed the fifth grade, but was a self-educated man with uncommon good sense and human wisdom. I have never felt I have ever attained the status of wisdom he had.

Like you, I have a sense of the commenters here as being older and wiser than me. (Most aren’t older, but they are wiser.) Also, even though I know Neo is younger, she is, in my mind, an older soul with much to teach to we young’uns. There are so many here who are much better read than me. So many with interesting life experiences. So many with practical knowledge of subjects I know little or nothing about. I often think of Neo’s place as being like a college seminar. Issues and ideas are examined, discussed, and debated. The result for me is that I feel enriched by it all. I feel happy when I can chime in and add my two cents worth, even if that two cents worth is really only a penny’s worth. 🙂

Aging is the universal human experience. It is different for each individual, but we must all face it as best we can. IMO, that’s why this post and comment thread has been meaningful for us. We all need guide posts to help us along the journey and the experiences of others provide those markers.

It is very moving … and makes me feel connected to the others of my species … and proud to be human.

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Of course, thanks to so many of the commenters to this posting in particular, and the many others as well, for sharing your thoughts and your viewpoints. All of these are points of connection with fellow humans and valuable for that, as well as for the insights and the wisdom and the information.

My best wishes to all.

Yeah, I was more than surprised at the age of some of the people I’ve interacted with and read daily in the comments here. I had a sense that I was the young’un, of course, but I was thinking of elders in their late fifties and sixties. I’m astonished (and impressed) by the number of people here in their eighties.

“Impressed” because, truthfully, I’ve never been able to envision myself lasting that long, so I instinctively view it as an accomplishment. The active minds and lifestyles of these old folks puts me to shame. It’s awe-inspiring.

With respect to the younger crowd, I don’t remember why, but I always had the impression that blert and gringo were in my broad age bracket (pre-fifties). This might seem funny now, but my sense of Geoffrey Britain was of a robust British man in his forties. I thought art was on the younger side as well (fifties).

When I was growing up, through some combination of a stern disciplinarian upbringing courtesy of my father and a mystification of the adult world and what it meant to be an “Adult” in my own mind, I developed a near inability to speak to my elders as members of the same species as me. Not to say they were lower; on the contrary. I was always waiting for that moment when something would “click” inside of me letting me know that I too was an Adult. Until this moment arrived, all I could see was this: whatever I was, I certainly was not what my father and grandfather were – I was a child.

I’m still waiting for that moment. And bizarrely, I still look at my father and see “Adult,” as I do many (not all) of my elders, at least those in their sixties and up. I’m getting better, but it’s still difficult for me not to revert to treating any old guy I happen to be talking to like an Adult who might as well be my grandfather.

On the one hand, I’m well-mannered. On the other hand, I’m working with a weird pathology in here (*points to his skull*).

Just last month I spent a splendid two days in Jinan with an eminent professor of Assyriology visiting from Israel, and we hit it off so well I felt, by the time he left, as though I loved the man like family, or like an old, reliable mentor and friend. *Still* it was extremely hard for me to suppress my inhibitions and give in to his invitations to converse as an equal.

All of which is to say: it was a good thing I didn’t know the ages of everyone here for a long time. I may have opened up regardless, given the anonymity of the web, but I still think I would have hesitated to state my opinions so forcefully.

Another thing that occurred to me: it’s hard to believe I was barely 30 when I began frequenting this site. Does it make sense to say that, although much has changed in my life since then, somehow, whenever I find myself back here chewing the fat with you and the neo-ites, I feel like nothing has changed, like I’ve returned to a precious, lingering moment preserved in amber. Maybe it’s the fact that my spirit feels at home here, utterly comfortable and free, surrounded by people I’d love to spend eternity conversing with in the afterlife (a feeling of real communion I’ve never had, even in 20 years in academia). I seem to boil down to my essence when I enter these here precincts.

But that by the by.

I have to concur with your judgment that early experience with death tends to be more of a trigger activating already potentially contemplative types than something that flips people outright from, say, extroverted to introverted. It was certainly true in my case – I’ve always been ponderous. Death just accelerated my journey inwards by adding rocket fuel.

I think that your soul comes shining through in your writing.

I’m sorry you’re plagued by so many physical problems at such a young age. In my early forties (as I wrote in this post) I had very serious chronic pain for more than a decade, and yet it’s a lot better now, so perhaps there’s hope.

I, too, had quite a few relatives die when I was very very young. I do think it changes people and gives them a different perspective. But I also think it only does that to people who are already somewhat contemplative and “different” to begin with.

And I was surprised that so many regular commenters here are a bit long in the tooth. Perhaps there are a lot of silent young readers out there? Or perhaps not. There actually used to be a few more regular commenters here who were young, and I think some of them are still reading but more silent as commenters than they used to be.

Still, at age 37, I have already experienced devastating losses: my mother died when I was 12; my fiancee passed away before we had a chance to get married. All of my grandparents, save one, have passed away. The aunt I was closest to died the same year my fiancee did.

Thankfully, I still have my father and, most essential of all, my younger brother, who is everything to me. Most others have been claimed by the shadow of you-know-who.

So while I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’m inured to death, I have at least a Master’s degree in knowledge of loss, the grieving process, and how it scars the soul moving forward. Ecclesiastes made sense to me from an early age. Perhaps, in the end, that is what allowed me to grow up well beyond my years and interact with all of you old-timers here!

Which is to say, my soul is, in some sense, rather old. I relate better to most 80 year olds than I do to people my own age (37 is like 27 these days). As someone above me in the comments noted, there really is wisdom that comes simply from enduring life for a long time. Even some of the dumbest, dimmest bulbs cannot help but obtain a piece of it as the decades pass.

As for physical deterioration, while I know I haven’t seen the worst of it yet by any means, I have never been terribly robust, and I’m already a “shell” of what I was in my 20’s. I still look very fit and youthful due to lucky genetics, and aside from some premature receding of the hairline, I’m indistinguishable from a 20 year old. Recently, when I began teaching this past semester over here in China, the first thing the students asked me was my age. When I told them, they gasped in something like shock, whereupon I asked them how old I looked. “18,” they said, surely exaggerating – but you get the picture.

All of this masks an asthmatic, migraine-prone, severe anxiety disorder-suffering, IBD-afflicted insomniac who is grateful to have one day per week where he just feels normal. My knees and joints are shoddy, as is evidenced by my inability to sustain workouts without braces. I’d be more upset about this state of affairs if it weren’t just the next step in a continuous slide down a spectrum I’ve been on since birth. I’ve never really known what it is to be robust, so I don’t experience the decline as anything new or surprising. It sucks, but it’s always sucked.

Dreams? Oh, I’m still a dreamer. As long as I have my writing, that will never change. I will never get tenure – feh. I will never get respect from my academic peers for my work – couldn’t care less. As T noted above, adaptability and a steady focus on what you *can* control is essential to keeping the light shining. I can control whether I write or not and whether my writing meets *my* standards – or not. No one can take that from me except the reaper himself. Speaking for myself, the key to purposiveness is finding something that is yours alone which cannot be stolen, infringed, alienated, or thwarted except by you alone. This thing will be connected to the inner light, which is connected to the eternal light. When the direction of the soul is pointed there, you can’t really go wrong, even if you don’t always go right.

Again, with the caveat that I am only 37, I rather like getting older because of the mental and spiritual maturity that comes with it. I look back on the utter moron I was as a teenager and wouldn’t go back to that state if I could. What a nightmare! Burning, raging hormones; learning that could fit in a thimble; misguided valuations of worldly vs. eternal things; insecurities, vanities, you name it. Ecclesiastes may have made sense to me, but not because of anything I did – I just happened to have known the destiny of our lot from unfortunate early losses. Otherwise, I knew squat and understood less.

No thank you.

The sadness, pain, loss, and nostalgia are real, but even they are seasoned with a certain resigned calm that leaves them tasting at least bittersweet. I won’t lie and say I feel this way *every* day, but an overall mood of being more or less at peace with things is an inestimable blessing. It makes everything *cleaner:* thoughts, feelings, actions, goals. Clean. Polished. Simpler. It takes a lot of muddying from the dirt that life kicks up to purify the heart. Clean and simple is a state that is earned, a way of being that I wouldn’t trade for all the youth in the world. It’s also an irony I marvel at more with each passing year, that in youth, when the heart is so innocent and inexperienced, the raging torrent of information, newness, feelings, and an open, seemingly limitless horizon actually leads to a confused and complicated inner life, with very little that is unequivocal, whereas in old age, when the soul is so heavy with loss and burden, the result is something more straightforward, no-nonsense, and, well, *clean.*

Anyway, thank you all for sharing your experiences – it’s been an education.

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which.

François-René de Chateaubriand

Congratulations Roy!

My wife does her meditation. But, I do mine in the form making daily chores a work of perfection. A little OCD, I suppose, but having the time to indulge my obsessive-compulsive tendencies is luxury that I never had before.

Again thinking about mortality, another poem from my great great uncle’s widow.

Mrs. Jane Kennedy December 7th, 1865

(?) with they what had I’ll clasp
In fairer worlds on high
And a happy thought steals over me now
There will be no sad good-bye.

The ? are transcription questions.

Lee,
Just because we haven’t achieved the goals of our youth does not mean we have failed. …Sometimes the goals we plan are not the goals we achieve.
* * *
So true.
I haven’t done most of what I planned to do when I left HS for college, and college for profession, and profession for family & church service, and … what comes after that??
The one goal I did achieve was having grandchildren, which was always on my list (kids are the means to the end, but I like mine quite well, as it happens).
But there have been lots of good things along the way, and there’s still time (actualrially speaking) for me to write the book I’ve been drafting for 30 years.

In re reluctance to changing the past, in case things don’t get better, a lot of SF writers have explored that situation.

https://pjmedia.com/drhelen/being-older-doesnt-have-to-suck/