For the life of me, I cannot figure out why my mind and body refuse to age at the same rate. My mind is lagging so far behind my body that they are now often coming into conflict. As a result I can’t reconcile my biological age with my mental one. Mentally I’m solidly in my 30’s (well, maybe 40’s). My mind says, “Go ahead”. My body says, “Don’t you dare”. Unfortunately my mind usually wins the initial argument but my body, in the end, has the last say. And what it says is, “I told you so”.
The same thing happens with mirrors. I don’t look in mirrors anymore because I’m never sure who’s staring back at me. I try to stay out of the way of cameras for the same reason. I look at pictures from twenty years ago and everything seems in order. There is no disconnect. But family shots from just last Thanksgiving are disorienting. Now I try to volunteer to take all the photos and avoid the problem altogether. Selfies are, quite obviously, out of the question.
And new technologies are making it even more difficult. The first time I used FaceTime was startling. I was not, in the least, prepared for HD. My grandchildren love to video chat and spend most of the time looking at themselves in the video window and spend most of our session amusing themselves by making faces. The face I see in my little window is not amusing. I am considering placing a post-it note over it and calling it good.
All this leads me to realize that old age is often accompanied by an identity paradox. I am not as old as I appear (in my mind, at least). But I am not as young I think I am (so says my body). It reminds me of a time when I was in my early 50s and I was conducting a workshop for a group of seniors (mostly women and mostly in their 70s). As a teaching aid I was using one of those optical illusion posters where if you look at it one way you see one image and if you look at it another way you see a different image. This particular one (quite by coincidence) was of a beautiful young princess (if viewed one way) and of an old, old woman (if viewed the other way). Most saw the princess first. Then I pointed out the old woman. There was the young princess and the old woman merged in the same frame. After some discussion about perception I started to summarize and made the observation, “You know, I have come to understand that inside every older woman lives a young woman, both inhabiting the same frame”. The entire room of nearly eighty older women erupted in applause. They understood. And I guess that now, more than a decade later, I am beginning to understand, because inside this old man still lives a young one. And somehow those two are going to have to come to an understanding, some sort of agreement, about how these two can live together in the same frame without having to be an optical illusion.
Balancing Act 