Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Have you ever looked at your calendar for the week and felt something slightly cold about it? All those blocks, all those things that have to happen. And a small voice asking a question you would rather not sit with: what is all this actually for?
Not in a gloomy way. In a genuinely practical way. Because there is a deadline none of us negotiate, and everything else is arranged around it whether we admit it or not.
I have been standing in line for twenty minutes, watching the cashier count down the seconds on her screen. Everyone else in the line is checking their phone, scrolling through photos of people who are not there, or staring at the floor. I am doing the same. We are all waiting for the transaction to be over, for the permission to move, for the moment we can walk out the door and return to the safety of the office or the couch.
We treat time as a resource we can stretch or save, something we can manage if we just move fast enough. We arrange our entire day around the illusion that we are in control, that we can choose when to start and when to stop, that the end of the day is a boundary we draw ourselves. Fair enough. You might be right.
If I stop at the bank and get coffee and take the long way home, I have technically spent the same amount of time. But I feel different about it. I feel like I have thrown something away. I feel like I have lost something.
The feeling comes from the fact that the day has a limit that I cannot see, a limit that nobody ever sends me a calendar invite for. I do not know when the day will end. I just know that it must end. This invisible limit is the only thing that gives the hours between sunrise and sunset their shape.
It is the invisible border that makes the line in front of the bank seem real. Without that border, the queue is just a dream.
What has happened to me since has been that I have become much more prepared to talk about death, to see it as another thing that life provides us with, just like birth, growing old, getting sick, and so on, and to understand it as the end goal of life rather than an unexpected event that happens just to take away our faith, our hope and our sensibility. Death is the debt that we all pay. How do we make it a productive debt, rather than an NPL? I mean an NPL, a non-performing loan, that debt that you know is coming but do nothing to prepare for, and you end up paying it all at once with interest.
A Roman senator named Cicero sat in the Forum in Rome and got terrified of the idea that he might be forgotten after he died. He spent his entire political career writing books about how to live, and how to write, and how to argue. He wrote a book called On Old Age. He wanted to make sure his mind was strong enough to outrun his body.
He decided that old age is not a disease to be cured, but a season of the year, like winter, where you stop running and you start planting trees that other people will sit under. He believed that if you accept the limit of your time, you stop trying to be a god and start being a man. You do what you can, and then you let go. You might be right at this point.
You might look at a line of old people waiting for a bus and think they look tired, not like someone planting trees. You might think aging is just wasting away. I have seen my father aged and I have seen how he had coped with it -- both elegantly and clumsily -- and I have derived my understanding of aging from such a direct, intimate, and painful experience living, for 28 years, with the man whom I loved the most. Personally, I think of aging as an absolutely exciting thing.
It is the process that, while moving us closer to death, also enables us to experience our body differently. Who wouldn't want that? It sounds strange to call aging exciting. But think about it.
When you are young, you are obsessed with what you are not yet. You are obsessed with getting into university, getting a driver's license, getting into a relationship. You are rushing forward because you think the good stuff is always over there, in the future. Then you get older and you realise you cannot rush anymore.
Your knees click, your energy shifts, and you have to make room for new things. You can't just go out and make your life more exciting every single day. We wouldn't have to go out of our way, like what we're doing every day, to make our life more exciting, more purposeful, more meaningful. We could just stay at home and wait for our memory of everything around us to be automatically refreshed every once in a while.
Wallah, everything is new and exciting again! That is a trick your mind plays on you when you are running away from the clock. I think of it as a hallucination. I was in a conference on eldercare recently, and I heard a doctor talk about how older people often feel like they are living in a dream.
The world is fresh and new because the part of the brain that filters out background noise gets weaker. You don't filter out the traffic, the noise, the small details. You see them all. You see the cracks in the pavement.
You see the expression on a stranger's face. It is exhausting. It is not "exciting" in the fun way. It is exciting in the way that a thunderstorm is exciting.
It is loud, and it reminds you that you are here, right now, inside the world. The border is the wall that holds the dream together. When the wall is gone, the dream dissolves into the noise. Of course, I'd like to live longer than my father who passed away in his early 60s, but the only thing that I know is that there's no way I could know what the future may bring.
We are obsessed with wanting to be successful, and with the said abhorrence against aging, we tend to admire those who become so successful when they are yet to be considered old by societal standards, which, I think, also makes no sense -- simply because we don't know what the future may bring. We are obsessed with the snapshot. We look at a young billionaire and say, "That is the ideal." We look at an old man and we say, "He is finished." But we are guessing. We are guessing about what the future holds.
Maybe the young billionaire will get sick. Maybe the old man will write a great book in his eighties. No one knows. I don't want to be a statue of success.
I want to be a person who is still learning how to be a person when my skin starts to wrinkle. I have taken so many detours in life simply because I didn't have the privilege to get access to the information that would have allowed me to know much early on in life about what I really want and what really matters. Your attraction and your contribution will solely be your mind and soul, and that which, though may not be as appealing at first, is what Cicero believes to be the truest reward one could get in life. I like telling people how old I am.
I like to admit that I may look older than my actual age, even though I am skeptic about these kinds of aesthetic standards. Who has the right to say that this or that person look older or younger than his or her counterparts anyway? I don't care if I look my age. I care if I can still think clearly.
I care if I can still laugh at a bad joke. I care if I can still be useful to someone else. That is the only currency that matters. It does not matter if you look thirty or sixty.
Everyone is guessing. Whoever would like to make a comment like that must be, at least, sort of certain that he or she has seen a large number of people -- large enough to make a judgement call whether a person looks older or younger than his/her peers. In my life, I have not seen someone who could sensibly make that call -- simply because there are too many people in the world for anyone to be able to make an informed generalization about how one should look at a certain age. You look at a stranger and you see a face.
You do not see an age. You do not see a biography. You do not see an NPL. You see a person.
We are all just guessing at each other's stories. The only thing that is real is the moment you are in right now, and the only thing you can do is try to make it a good moment.
Fair enough. You might be looking at a man in his sixties with grey hair and thinking, "Exciting? I want to be fast and strong, not slow and wrinkly." It feels like a failure of the imagination to call it exciting. It is easier to think of aging as a decline, a loss of the things that make us useful.
But I have seen my father aged, and I have seen how he had coped with it — both elegantly and clumsily — and I have derived my understanding of aging from such a direct, intimate, and painful experience living, for 28 years, with the man whom I loved the most. Who wouldn't want that? You want that, and so do I. I think the mistake is in thinking we have to manufacture excitement by changing our jobs or buying new things.
We run around trying to make our life more exciting, more purposeful, more meaningful, like we are trying to prove something to a judge. But a deadline works because it is a small death. You are forced to let go of all the other possibilities and just do the one thing in front of you. The real one is the only scheduling constraint that never slips.
It comes for all of us, and it does not care if we are ready. If we can accept that as a deadline, not a tragedy, we might find that the excitement is just sitting at the table waiting for us. Look at old people who spend their days worrying about looking young. They are fighting a war they cannot win.
But I like telling people how old I am. I do not have the right to say that this or that person look older or younger than his or her counterparts anyway. I have not seen someone who could sensibly make that call — simply because there are too many people in the world for anyone to be able to make an informed generalization about how one should look at a certain age. If we stop fighting the clock, we start using the time we have left.
That is the truest reward one could get in life.
Then, we wouldn't have to go out of our way, like what we're doing every day, to make our life more exciting, more purposeful, more meaningful. Fine. You might not be convinced by my concise propaganda here yet, so let me try again. What got me thinking about aging is a conference on eldercare in which I just participated.
I want to live longer than my father who passed away in his early 60s, but the only thing that I know is that there's no way I could know what the future may bring. So you keep your youthful face and your early wins, and I will keep my wrinkles and my detours. What is left of me when the money and the job titles are gone? That is the only part of the schedule I can rely on, because it is the only thing that is truly mine.