I had an interesting thought today. I was thinking about growing from a baby to a young child. I have never seen truly happy babies during this stage of life. Most days are filled with frustrations of things they can not do yet. Most of the frustration is usually because their minds start to envision things their bodies do not know how to do yet.
From thinking about babies and the frustration they go through because their wants advances their abilities, that we in the end of our lives suffer from our bodies advancing our thinking! We do not remember the frustrations we lived through from about six months to three or four years old when we wanted to do something, but we could not, because we had not developed our fine motor skills yet.
Our diets change too as the years go by. One day we are walking along and it is lunch time. We think we want pizza for lunch. Our favorite pizza, the same combination we have been eating for at least twenty years now. We order, receive, and start to eat our favorite pizza. Suddenly it does not taste as satisfying as it did just last week when we treated ourselves to a slice of pizza.
Even our thinking changes in our later years. I can not speak for women, but for men, sex is the main brain topic from waking to sleeping, and maybe during sleep too. Men go through their lives talking with women in every conceivable circumstance, yet in their minds they are usually thinking about sex with the women of interest at the moment. It is just the way men are built. Suddenly one day a man realizes he is talking with a woman and something is different! It takes a few seconds, but he realizes that for the first time in his adolescent to adult life, he sees the woman in front of him as a person, not as a possible sex object.
Some parts of getting old are not so interesting or benign. For some of us little things we took for granted such as proper body function now quit working in the most humiliating, or embarrassing ways. We become incontinent. We become a gas factory that could probably supply the Country’s methane gas needs daily. We have trouble digesting foods that we used to love, or certain foods now give us a stomach ache.
When we think we can not take any more, the real diseases set in. We have high blood pressure, heart trouble, eye problems, back problems, pains and aches that come and go and sometimes come and decide to stay.
Most people of course do not find this time of life too enjoyable. How can they with their bodies falling apart? I am starting to wonder though how can we not enjoy this time of ending? Our bodies have given us great service for so many years, and they are now getting tired. Our bodies are now taking control of the end of our lives, and no matter what we would like to do about it, what we can do is mostly limited to observation.
Our trouble is we can not just observe, we have to observe with opinion and emotion. I think we need to become more proactive and observe with happiness, and contentment, possibly even enjoyment. We may not be able to control getting old and dying, but we can control how we react to it.
We can choose how what emotions we allow into our lives as our bodies start to do what is natural after so many years of life. I hope for myself at least I can find enjoyment in the way my body shuts itself down. I can not do anything about it, and I enjoyed my body at its best, so the least I can do is enjoy the idea, it is doing what it thinks is best for me.
In essence, I can enjoy and appreciate that my body is doing the best it can with the every day more limited resources it has to work with. This seems more natural to me, and much better than being bitter and resentful that my body which served me so well, is now shutting itself down because it has no more to give.
