It is an important question. The one significant answer, if one were to distill it to just one, is that the alternative to growing old is to die young.
If life is indeed a journey, then it follows that growing old allows for a much longer trip. It also means getting to more places than had it been otherwise.
If the price of the ticket to growing old are chronic pains, a bigger medicine cabinet, a thicker medical file, fading vision and straining to listen to normal conversation, or having hip or knee replacements, always keep in mind that that ticket is not due to be collected till towards the end. So, enjoy the journey to its fullest.
I notice too that getting old also allows for stories to get better with each recollection. The privilege of editing is not what preoccupies the youth. They are too busy to introspect or think deeper than and beyond the spur of the moment. By the time we get to a certain age we get to enjoy the accumulated paint brushes and a more colorful pallet and a bigger canvass on which to express and tell our stories. Our keystrokes may be slower but our vocabulary is larger, our knowledge substantially wider. The alternative to growing old is the limited experience of youth.
"I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience".
-------- President Ronald Reagan
Only when we get to a certain age when we acquire the audacity to say, "Youth is over rated". It is also the time, the only time actually, when we can say with deep conviction that youthfulness is not the strongest quality of the young, or that we sometimes say, "If only we were able to keep our youth and didn't squander it when we were young", whatever that means, since I don't really know where I was going with that one.
Here is the reason why, as we get older, time seems to go faster:
On the other hand, this is what bothers some people. Why does time have to flow only in one direction? You see, we are all gifted to understand life better looking back but we can only live it going forward. The only entity I know that was able to do it differently was Merlin in King Arthur's court. At least, in one version of the king's lore. In that story Merlin lived going backwards in time - he experienced the future while living "forward" in the direction where he is yet to confront the past. How he and King Arthur were able to interact was never explained in that story. Although I should remind you. That was a Broadway musical, "Camelot". On stage or cinema, producers and directors can do whatever they want. After all, Lerner and Lowe were able to turn a cockney flower girl into a princess in "My Fair Lady". But, I digressed.
So, we shouldn't be worrying about growing old. Once we get to that point, the dreadfulness of when we used to worry about the uncertainty of the future is all gone because we are already in it now. We made it. And we could care less about what happened in the past. We shouldn't want that to be a burden. Besides, the future that we used to worry about is not so bad. Given that perhaps life in a few instances was not fair, to be alive today is still a good thing. Really. It's a gift.
The folks of a certain age reading this - you know who you are - have that privilege to have gone aboard the rail car of life far longer than others who didn't get to board because they didn't have the express ticket to a longer life. The long trip, as often the case, may be fraught with a lot of challenges but it beats the local bus. The scenery is better. Even if not, remember, the power to edit is the reward of living longer, specially if you outlast all the potential critics to your story.
Getting the full value of life's ticket is to finish the journey. Losing the ticket early is a tragedy we do not wish on anyone. Handing it over at the station after a life's long journey should never be feared. Instead we should cherish the experience while it lasts. Old age is that time just before we reach the final stop and it is the only stage in life where we can claim, "We know better".
Above all, the one reason we want to try to live life at its fullest, and achieve one that was well lived, is because there are no round trips for the rail way of life.
Hold on to that ticket. Live well. Live life like it is the only one you have.
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