Benefits of age

Being aged 3/4 of a century is not as bad as you young whippersnappers want to make it out to be, and while you crack wise about how long it takes me to get out of the car and into the drugstore, when I do get there, it's Senior Discount Day, and you look at me like "Could you get me 10% off this Axe Body Spray?" 

And I have to say no. No one should want to smell like an axe. 

But here's an article in the Washington POST about this very topic. Richard Sima writes about how you have fewer regrets when you get up to the age at which people look upon you sort of dolefully. 

Sima says you have fewer regrets when you get up in the age that you don't always feel like you should get up at all. Middle age is the time for regrets: wishing you had gone back for that advanced degree or gone back for another slice of pizza, ruing the day that you didn't tell the boss to shove that box of old files up his attic, reliving the time you had the chance to drive in the winning run at the softball picnic, but you struck out.

Old age helps you realize that the degree would have put you in a higher tax bracket, the slice of pizza would have kept you up that night, the boss would have tied a can to you, and who cares about some softball game thirty years later?

Sima also cites "more knowledge" as a reason for reveling in the golden years. You remember the old saw that Mark Twain cranked out about how dumb your father was when you were 16, and how much the old man had learned in just 5 years when you hit 21, right? We get a lot of things wrong in our 30s and 40s, and then by the time the band is looking for the sheet music to "Closing Time," you've had a chance to read up on things, so you know better than keep playing when you should fold, you know the difference between Robert F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and surely by then you have learned that the car that's been tailing you is probably not a fire chief, so slow it down, buddy.

And he wraps his treatise up by saying we have more wisdom, too. Knowledge is having facts at our fingertips. Wisdom is knowing that maybe those fingertips and the rest of the hand should be home reading a book.

Sima says that we old geysers did better emotionally during the pandemic than the young and the restless, because we have been through bad times before and know the outcomes tend to be better than we fear. I've told many a younger person than I that it really seemed like the world was coming to an end in 1968, with riots and assassinations and turmoil from here to Czechoslovakia, and yet, along came 1969 and the promise of a new day, led by an energetic and dynamic young man named Richard Nixon.

Well, anyway. Enjoy being young and restless for now, but hang in there long enough, and you will be the Victor, a New Man.