The agony of aging is not in the aging but in being perceived to be aging. You will live to be a hundred years, yet find nothing as profound as this observation. If you will wipe the drool off your face I shall proceed to enlighten you on this matter.
You will have heard, if you've lived long enough, the saying, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This describes perfectly the agony of aging. The flesh gives up, gives in, gives out, before the spirit. You can't do all you'd like to do.
To be more accurate, you can do a lot more than people think you can, but you can't prove it. You know you can do it. You do it all the time, in your mind. But when it comes to acting it out, the body doesn't cooperate.
One thing you must understand about aging, if you haven't aged yet, is that no one is ever as old as their statistics. Time goes faster than the spirit. For example, I'm twenty years old. I've been twenty years old since I turned twenty, which was about thirty years ago. The agony, the sheer agony, is I'm perceived to be over fifty years old. The agony is greater because it is the twenty year old girls who seem completely blind to my true age, which is twenty years. Strangely enough, fifty year old women aren't as blind as twenty year old girls.
It is invariably the case that fifty year old women think I'm younger than my statistical age, while the twenty year olds think I'm older than my true age of twenty. This is the only case where vision improves with age. The younger they are, the blinder they are (in matters of age.)
The other agony of aging is people tell you to slow down, take it easy, don't exert yourself, you must consider your age, take care of yourself, you aren't as young as you used to be, watch your diet, you must get a check up,...
They just don't stop trying to make you feel old. They make it worse by constantly saying how young you look. Have you ever heard a young person being told how young he or she looks? Have you ever heard a crippled person being told how slow they are? Have you ever heard a visually impaired person being told how blind they are?
Do you get the point? You only say how young a person looks to someone who looks about a hundred years old. And the hundred year old knows you're lying when you say that. Actually the hundred year old thinks it's funny, just as the hundred year old women giggle when they're refered to as "young girls."
But this fifty-plus years old isn't amused to be told how young he looks. And this young-at-heart isn't amused when twenty year old girls are amused when he tries to woo them. They think it's a joke. Well, if it's a joke it's an agonizing joke.
Why do they look at my exterior? Why don't they look into my heart? Don't they see the pure treasure they're passing up? Imagine this: A twenty year old heart, with a fifty year experience. What a combination! But they prefer a twenty year old body, with a ten year old heart, and a five year old brain.
Understand this now, before you are perceived to be older than you are. The agony of aging is in being perceived to be older than you are. You are never as old as you're perceived to be. No human ever grows older than twenty years; at the most, twenty-five. That is why in heaven all humans are eternally twenty years old.
The agony is, when they grant you your eternal age of twenty years in heaven, you can't have all the fun you'd like to have. If I had a choice, I'd be twenty years old for seventy years here on earth, and then I'd be willing to be a hundred years old in heaven.
Actually, if I could be twenty years old for seventy years, I wouldn't care if there is heaven or not; I wouldn't care if there is eternal life or not. Seventy years of enjoying an age of twenty years would be heaven on earth. The agony is, you don't get it here, and you don't know if you'll have it there.
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