I heard of someone the other day who was told off for talking too much about her age. She is 73. Robustly she defended her right to share with other people the sort of experiences which we have tried to identify in these postings. \u2018This is important to me\u2019, she said, \u2018so I want to talk about it\u2019. And so she should. I agree with her, though I recognise the dangers. If confession is good for the soul, expression can be helpful to the mind. Just talking to the mirror is no fun. There\u2019s so much that\u2019s new about these latter years of life. To keep it all bottled up can make what is otherwise odd into something that seems disturbingly bad. We can\u2019t demand it, but we do need an audience sometimes.<\/p>\n
I suppose you have to wait for the right moment and the right person. Younger people have limited patience with the elderly. For them they can be the people who hold up the bus queue, try to make friends with little children, can\u2019t find the change to pay at the checkout and start speaking sentences they can\u2019t finish. Speed is everything today. Older people are slow!<\/p>\n
The middle-aged are working so hard at not being old that they don\u2019t want to be reminded of the horizons that await them. When I was still one of them, I used to hear my mother say again and again that she wished she was dead. We all tried to reassure her that we wanted her to live, forgetting that she actually needed to say these things to us. This was her story. Frail herself and now a widow, she no longer had the appetite for life. We should have allowed her to tell us so.<\/p>\n
In fact those of us who are getting on carry an experience that might be of value to everyone if more people would allow us to share it. We are guardians of a dimension of life into which most people one day will enter. We have frustrations and fears and we are inclined to moan a lot, but there\u2019s a resilience and courage and even serenity about us that we would like to express as well. It has been hard to come by, this knowledge we have had to learn, and we shouldn\u2019t keep it to ourselves.<\/p>\n
\u2026so, please, may we talk the talk? It could be of benefit to others as well as to ourselves.<\/p>\n
B.R.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I heard of someone the other day who was told off for talking too much about her age. She is 73. Robustly she defended her right to share with other people the sort of experiences which we have tried to identify in these postings. \u2018This is important to me\u2019, she said, \u2018so I want to talk about it\u2019. And so she should. I agree with her, though I recognise the dangers. If confession is good for the soul, expression can be helpful to the mind. Just talking to the mirror is no fun. There\u2019s so much that\u2019s new about these <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"yoast_head":"\n