I am not a pessimist: I am a realist!
--Charles Sullivan
If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.
You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good help to you nevertheless
And filter and fiber your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
--From Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
I am astonished by how tiny and thin my legs are! They resemble pencils! I’ve lost significant muscle mass from my legs, and I need to do something about it, to the extent that I can. The name for this phenomenon is Sarcopenia. Old people lose about seven percent of their muscle mass each decade, and the process accelerates the longer one lives. I call it slipping away.
How does one explain what it is like being old to a younger person? First, being old must be distinguished from getting old. Clearly I am already there and there is no point denying it. My body is changing, and with it so too is my perspective. Alopecia has claimed my hair. All of it. It feels like the process of aging is accelerating. To my astonishment, the difference between being 68 and 70 seems quite significant, an unbridgeable chasm, from where I am now.
The bright side is that you can belch, fart, shit your pants, piss your pants and vomit, choke to death on a peanut, and fall down and no one notices or cares. These behaviors are attributed to being old. They are expected in this culture of the self.
You can buy diapers for old people at any drug store or Walmart. But most old people wouldn’t be caught dead in them. Who wants to shuffle along with a load of excrement in their shorts, smelling like a litter pan that hasn’t been changed for a month in a house full of cats? Leave us a shred of dignity for Christ sake!
This old body of mine is like an abandoned house that is no longer kept in good repair. It is only a matter of time before the roof leaks and hastens the interior’s depreciation, its demise and final collapse, a pile of rubble that no longer resembles what it was. Disorganization. Chaos. Decomposition.
I hardly recognize myself these days. I’ve never been this old before. It is all so unfamiliar, as if it were happening to someone else, and I am somehow standing partially outside of my body, observing the spectacle, simultaneously being observer and the object observed. Departing consciousness, mirages shimmering in the desert of selfness.
Without fear, I find little comfort in knowing that it is only going to get worse, if I live long enough. Perhaps that is why old people often look so grim and serious, but I do still enjoy being alive. I continue to laugh and smile and challenge myself. I still enjoy and savor the company of the people I care about. I can still walk long distances on mountain trails. I intend to savor the time I have left, whatever experience it brings.
Being old feels like I am observing myself, like an actor on a stage, as both the actor and a member of the audience. What an odd sensation this split vision, as if I were standing ever so slightly outside of this bag of flesh I call my body. The notion of selfness, of having a separate identity from my surroundings, feels like an illusion to me.
It is sobering to know that I’ll never be this young again. I am on the way out, and I must accept that. There is nothing I can do to turn back the hands of time. No point in resisting or struggling against the inevitable. Go with the flow. Do we really have any other choice? Raise your sail and use the wind to your advantage.
Approaching the end of life is equivalent to entering the wildest wild that can be conjured by the human imagination. Adventure awaits at the terminus. My Rubicon beckons, and, dear reader, so does yours. You are only more distant from it than I am from mine, but rest assured that it is waiting for you.
My senses are changing; they are more blunted and dulled each passing year. Every perception feels more surreal, less connected to what we call reality. What is reality anyway? Every waking moment feels less real and more dream-like. The delineation between dream and reality is blurred with age. I am leaving the realm of substance bit by bit, particle by particle and entering a more ethereal state of being. The space between the particles is increasing and the particles are fewer in number.
I remind myself that, according to modern physics, matter cannot be destroyed; it changes form. That is what is happening to me.
Every moment, consciousness is waning, and I am at once slipping away into nothingness and everything. I feel diluted. I am aware that I am dissolving into the background, unnoticed by anyone. Less of what is known as “me” remans in this form. Where have the missing parts of me gone? I surmise that my skinny ass was absorbed by my protruding man boobs. Be careful. You could poke your eye out if you get too close. Am I still me? Am I still here? And where is here? Are time and space even real?
The aching in my arthritic knees will worsen, making it more challenging to remain ambulatory. Parts are wearing out. My mind is slower and more addled than it was last year. My vision is deteriorating. I don’t hear as well as I used to. I am shrinking and bending like a bow, losing grace, speed and agility, but still moving.
My wife has an artificial hip and knee, like replacing a worn tie rod on a car. I am somewhere between uncomfortable and fascinated to see how this ends. The unknown always affects us that way. Being old takes getting used to. Acceptance of reality. I am acutely aware that my existence is embedded in cycles, and now the trajectory is leading downward. Perihelion inevitably leads to aphelion in the elongated orbits of birth and death, being and non-being, consciousness and unconsciousness.
How does one wrap his brain around all of this? I see my two sisters, both of them a few years older than me, on a similar trajectory. My wife is eight years my senior. I have friends older than me by a decade or more. Every year they are fewer in number. All of us are approaching the waterfall. We hear its roar and feel the cold spray on our faces. Apparitions of quavering rainbows appear through the spray, dispersed sunlight seen through the prisms of water vapor.
We ponder what it will it be like when we go over the edge and become one again with the river. Does our journey end there? Does life even have a clearly defined beginning and end? The river continues its passage to the sea beyond the waterfall, just as it did before reaching the fall. Water vapor circumnavigates the biosphere and falls as rain elsewhere. Have we ever truly been separated from the river? I doubt it.
Cycles are operating within cycles. Birth, death, and rebirth? I cannot pretend to know, because I cannot define where “I” end, and where my surroundings begin. Everything we think we know is shrouded in mystery. Every wave has a trough. Every peak a valley. Matter is embedded in a
matrix of what we call empty space. River and waterfall. You and me. Us. Everyone. Everything. Nothing.
Light requires darkness and darkness light. Each reveals the other. It’s all the same.
—
Charles Sullivan was born and raised in Hagerstown, MD. He currently resides in Morgan County, WV where he has lived for over thirty years.He has thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, the John Muir Trail in the Eastern Sierra Mountains of California and other foot trails. At the age of seventy, he remains an avid backpacker. Charles is also a natural philosopher and a freelance writer.