There Comes A Time When You Have To Say, “I’m Too Old For This!"

Quite frankly, there’s something quite annoying about ageing.

Over a relatively short time, the body subtly begins to betray you; the memory is now simply a source of forgetfulness and the endless replaying of one's personal history ad nauseam, with only yourself to listen to it.

However, there actually does come a time when you realize that there is something rather liberating about ageing:

 Attitude. Only when you hit the dreaded 60 can you begin to say, with great aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”

I have now adopted this as my personal mantra and begun to live it and I am pleasantly surprised by how easily I simply shrug off minor issues that once would have knocked me off my perch.  I have come to the conclusion that “old” may be too strong a word and, perhaps I should consider the phrase, “I’m too wise for this”, but really, old is what I am and I should embrace it, after all, I’ve bloody well earned it

 These days I let other, similarly, aged men feel bad about their emerging liver spots, bulging bellies, receding hairlines along with their multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too old for this. (Or should I use wise) I wasted so much time as a teenager feeling insecure about my looks.

No part of the body was spared. Why am I not taller, did I have to be cursed with curly hair? My toes, all over the place, my face, too angular, my nose a tad too big. Nothing then felt right. Well, O.K., I appreciated my knees, I have fabulous knees. But that’s about it. What torture we inflict upon ourselves when we are young. If we don’t whip ourselves into a state of self - loathing, there are seemingly many along the way that will gladly do it for us.

One day recently I finally got around to transferring thousands of family photographs into a digital file. There I was, ages 10 to 40, and I saw for the first time that even when I was in the depths of despair about my looks, I was actually rather attractive!

Those smiles, radiant with youth, stared back at me out of the past, reminding me of the smiles I know today, now radiant with strength. So, why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have no doubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how bloody young and fabulous I was then, how filled with joy and passable good looks.

I’m happy to have a body that still seems to perform as it was programmed to do and gets me where I want to go; sometimes it complains bitterly at the prospect of excess exertion but hangs in there and gets the job done, albeit at a more sedentary pace. Perhaps I’m too old for skintight jeans, outrageous tattoos and dyeing my hair the colours of the rainbow but sometimes I confess the thought does cross my mind.

The way I have dealt with weight gain was to move to the looser end of the wardrobe, trying (unsuccessfully most days) to cut down on my beer intake. Nothing to lose sleep over and anyway, perhaps I’m getting too old for sleep, or so it seems most nights, which can leave me a little grumpy during the day, a good thing as I now work from home and others do not have to endure my moods.

I’m over office politics, backstabbing colleagues and naked ambition. I’ve seen it all, watching others, whose sole purpose seemed to be to make more money, acquire more stuff that they didn’t really need, only to crumble when positions shuffled, then having to listen to the kowtow and mumbles of stifled resentment.

I want to tell my younger colleagues that it really doesn’t matter. Except for the unfairness, which, like the roots of a tree is deep-rooted, it pops up, again and again, to try and bring you down. What matters most as the years advance is the work. Work should give you pleasure, and in some instances hope. These days my work as a writer is the most difficult and yet the most rewarding thing I have ever done. I’m too old now for the dark forces, or hopelessness and despair. I sometimes think that had I adopted this philosophy years ago life might be a little different today…ah, hindsight tis a wondrous thing.

I believe that the key to life is resilience, and I figure that I am now old enough to make such a bald statement. We spend our years getting knocked down but it’s the getting up that counts and, by the time you reach the upper middle age, you will have started over, and over again. Resilience is the key to feeling twenty again, which is how I feel some days, often with disastrous results.

I figure I am too old to try to change people. I’ve learned, that what you see in someone at the beginning is what you get forevermore. Some of us are receptive to a bit of behaviour modification and age does induce the ability to follow perhaps a gentler path.  After years of listening to people whine about bad bosses, miserable jobs, failed marriages or errant lovers, I began hearing the same strains like one of those annoying songs that get stuck in your head.

 Self-opinionated people? Toxic people? Sour, spoiled people? These days I simply walk away; I have no tolerance left in me for those sorts. I know now that friendships have ebbs and flows, and that that there is nothing quite as beautiful as the organic nature of love. I used to think that one didn’t make friends as one got older, but I’ve learned that the opposite happens. Sometimes, unaccountably, a new person walks into your life, and you realize that friendship is a glorious gift.

I now try to temper on my own unappealing behaviour: the pining, yearning, longing and otherwise frittering away of valuable brainwaves that could be spent on writing better prose or searching for something good to do in a community.

These days I can spot trouble a mile away (believe me, this is a massive improvement), and I can say to myself: I'm too old for this and in doing so, I spare myself a great deal of suffering for, as we all know, there is plenty of that to be had without looking for more.

 In this day and age, there are apps for everything but I can't find one that says, 'I’m too old for this', or an app that leads to an enlightened pathway to all that was once vexatious and a guide to eliminating everything that has done nothing but hold us back.

But really right now I feel I’m too old or wise to yearn after such a thing.

Paul v Walters is the author of five internationally best-selling novels and when not cocooned in sloth and procrastination in his house in Bali he scribbles for several travel and vox pop journals around the world. His latest offering Scimitar was released in late 2017 and his next novel Asset is scheduled for release in late 2019.

www.paulvwalters.com