Sunday, June 29, 2008

Ego & Aging

Ego and Aging

When you're young (under 40 or so) there is always hope that someday you will get life in order, and take the time to become all you hoped to be.

And, when you're very young (under 30) there is much more hope and opportunity, just not enough time or order in your life to accomplish this.

Of course, that's not true of everyone. Some fanatic weirdos take the time to go to a gym, or exercise some other way. They watch their diet, dress well, and always manage to look good and perform well regardless of time schedules, etc.

Don't you just hate them?

But for the rest of us, and most of the fanatics as well, (I am assuming,) experience old age. That is, if we live long enough.

We reach a point where the wrinkles start showing. Brown spots start appearing on the skin. If you are lucky enough to have kept most of your hair, you find that there is a lot more scalp showing between each one of them.

Bags appear under your once bright eyes. Your joints begin to ache and rebel. Your thighs, hinney, and waist begin to sag.

Of course, there are cures for all those things. At least, so the advertisers say. And in the early stages, you spend all your paycheck, as well as money your kids say you should be saving for their inheritance, on preparations to correct these flaws.

You give yourself a whole bunch of excuses, and even believe one ore two. But no one else understands. They call it "Mid-Life Crises."

But you know better. You're just taking care of yourself like you know you should.
(For more of this browbeating, see "Mid-Life Crises.)

Eventually, in spite of the fortune you have spent, the debt you have left to your children to repay, the foregone opportunity to better yourself in more important ways because it was spent standing in front of a mirror worrying about new wrinkles -- you grow old.

Growing old means that you have passed that point where you have enough money or energy, and the task is too awesome to tackle anyway, to go on covering up the aging process.

This is the time for you to take on a much more meaningful occupation.

Too late for your body. To late to consider a great career. Too late to get that PhD, (and the money for it is all gone anyway). Too late, but just the beginning.

Your hopes and dreams, your goals and good intentions, and every other youthful thing is behind you.

All that is left is: you.

No more image to uphold. No more pretenses. All that is gone, and all that's left is: freedom.

When Hope is lost, so are your worries about it. Hope is a future thing. Like the proverbial donkey and the carrot, it's always out there. Always in sight. But for one reason or another, unobtainable.

But there are things that are obtainable, that have been set aside in your youth. They are the factors that make you who you are. The real you. And now you are at an age that if others disagree with you, or don't like what you decide to do, they can lump it.

First, however, you have a monumental task ahead of you. You are going to have to do something that you have been avoiding all your life.

You are going to have to figure out who the real you is!

How do you do that? Where do you start?

Well, you have already started in a small way just by visiting this web site. No boasting. It's merely that here you will learn what some of the Masters, Philosophers, Religious Leaders, and even a bunch of old, uneducated geezers have to say on a variety of topics that confront us daily.

And I hope it helps. And I hope that you find the search for yourself easier than my own.

But now it's your time. Enjoy it.

I said earlier that the aging process is something we all go through.

Obviously there are some that even reach their 90's looking and acting like Spring Chickens.

Don't you just hate them?
*
Tumbleweed