What’s it like Growing Old?

If you're like me you had no knowledge of how things would turn out when you got into you 60's let alone 70's or 80's.

In my formative years while I was growing up the oldest people I had every met were my grandparents whom were in the middle 50's. That's how it was with my entire generation.

Sixty years old was very old and just a handful of people ever made it to seventy or eighty. Ninety and one hundred were never given any realistic thought.

There was the a-bomb and a world on fire with the spread of communism and no one my age figured we were going to make it to the ripe old age of our grandparents to begin with. Therefore we tended to rebel against all that was around us. The rebels of the 50's are old men and women just like me.

James Dean would be 70.

Our parents knew nothing and just what could our grandparents whom taught nothing that was important to our parents teach us that was important! Instead of paying attention to knowledge gathered over a lifetime we ignored all they had to say.

When I got to be 60 I had no knowledge of just how a 60 year old was supposed to act. When I was young I had never personally met anyone that old and as my grandparents grew older and into their 60's I knew they had nothing to offer so didn't hang around them that much.

The problem was that many people of my generation did the very same thing I did. We knew it all except how we were to handle growing old.

When I hit 60 and those that I knew hit it we were still acting like when we were forty, fifty. Still in whatever shapes we were in at the younger age. The body was still willing to do what the mind asked it to do. Gracefully getting older I am not doing.

Today heading like an express train towards eighty I am stiffer then I was 20 years ago and when I fall on my rear doing something athletic it takes longer to get up but still active and still working. The brain still functions but like when I was younger but there are few that want to hear anything that I have to offer in advice and only want to hear what it was like working in the olden days.

I found out the hard way that why my parents now seem so much smarter to me then when I was younger was because they got the same lectures they gave me from their parents whom got the lectures from their parents and on and on for generations.

Since the days of Aristotle and Plato children have always ignored those older than them but my generation took it to a new level. We not only ignored those older than us but started to place them in communities for their own well-being.

Took this knowledge they possessed and buried it behind gated walls. Even would go to court to make certain they had no interaction with their grandchildren.

Today I see what is all wrong with what is going on around me and have no voice to shout to the world of the errors that are happening because I am old and as old not to be paid any serious attention to. What does one my age have to offer those we created that know more than anyone else knows?

What's it like growing old in a body that still is willing and a mind that is still functions but with no voice in what happens around me? It is said that in life you reap what you have sowed.