The mind may be strong, but the body isn’t. As an oft-repeated statement among those who may think and feel they are robust and are on top of the world, it may well be a case of the person that you see and the person that other people see – who are two very different people.
For Robert Goldfarb, 85, one way by which he resists old age is by being on the treadmill regularly. However, he laments the fact and is compelled to face reality that even if he is a competitive runner, he is “running out of time.” He found it ominous that even the graph of the treadmill that supposedly monitors the changes in the runner’s heart rate goes no further than 70 years old – which means that “the machine presumes that anyone that old shouldn’t be on the thing.”
In a poignant personal experience article published on June 22, 2016, Goldfarb, a management consultant and author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” confesses that he gets tell-tale reminders very often nowadays that he is “now officially one of the old-old.” Aside from the treadmill display, he is confronting head-on his daughter’s forthcoming 60th birthday. Then, there are some well-meaning gestures like being offered a seat on the bus, or an airport personnel scurrying to get him a wheelchair so he didn’t have to walk or stand in line.
Adamant as he is, Goldfarb took to heart something that he had read from the philosopher Montaigne who wrote more than 400 years ago, but which can be applied to this day. He said: “The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it.” Thus, Goldfarb made a pact with himself “to seek a path through old age without surrendering to it or ignoring its reality.”
Initially, what Goldfarb did was to fight “memory lapses.” Instead of the convenient “whatever” each time he forgets a word, today, he makes an effort to remember a particular word, even if he has to apologize for the inconvenience he may have brought to people. He deliberately shuns words or phrases that connote the “end of things,” like “downsizing” or “I no longer do that.” Instead, Goldfarb has subscribed to Internet memory games and began rereading books he used to read in college.
Goldfarb tried to reach out to men his age to learn how they grappled with growing old. He said in his article that being a product of the 1950s, he usually “conforms, avoids risk, and shuns anything that marked one as ‘different,’”
Conversing with men his age soon became “awkward,” he said, as those he spoke with “regarded feelings as something to be endured, not discussed.” It did not take long for Goldfarb to realize that he “was free to contemplate growing old, but not with them (men his age).”
He also sought the company of younger men to talk about aging and, indeed, these men who were just 10 years younger “spoke openly about changes in their minds and bodies.” Goldfarb ventured a guess when he pondered on the free and open discussion of feelings among men born just a decade later. Perhaps, he mused, it could be because “they were shaped by the ‘60s, not the ‘50s, and they were defined by the ‘me’ generation of Woodstock and rock ‘n’ roll.”
Today, Goldfarb seeks to reinvent himself by asking “what I do out of habit” and “what I am not doing that could be liberating.” Guided by the song of Frank Sinatra, “September Song,” which goes this way: “But the days grow short when you reach September,” Goldfarb has realized that he “has reached November” and is thankful about it.
He still does his treadmill, but chooses to ignore its display, while “hoping I can lead a deeper and fuller life before I run out of time.”
Whether one is yet approaching the threshold of youth or is enjoying the twilight years, it is one’s attitude and positive outlook, with a dash of spirituality that would make life sweet and meaningful. – NWI
