One Effect of Aging

As I age (gracefully I hope!) ideas come to mind. Often. Some are mere flashes of memories. Others are serious thought on old ideas in fresh perspective. A new conclusion or two emerges from the murk. A tantalizing discovery remains on the outer edge of the thought; sometimes it comes into full bloom; many times it is lost in a mist.

Middle of the night think sessions reproduce some of these ideas lost in the mist, but I’m never sure I caught the exact one I missed before. It’s just one of those things. Accept it or not, thinking is logic with permutations too many to sort out. That is why we call thinking a miracle, an inspiration, or magic. Something just clicks and our best ideas are the result.

I’m reading E.L. Doctorow. He died recently and I wanted to familiarize myself with his kind of thinking. Scary and haunting for me because his word process and recall is similar to my own. I never knew that. Just reading his prose gives me renewed freedom to exercise my own style. Time will tell if this is of value!

I’ve written in this space in the past that aroma, the feel of surrounding air (temperature, humidity, amount of breeze) and sounds cause time and place recalls far from the past. Increasingly this occurs in my life. An effect of aging? The mind reviewing its past settings? The mind trying to re-process an old idea in a new manner to arrive at a startling conclusion? Or just a conclusion that affects me? Hmmmm.

Doctorow writes of this phenomenon. Interesting parallel. His style, too.

I’m beginning to think that aging may give the freedom of time and purpose to dwell more on ideas. This gives added impulse to follow an idea’s logic and atmosphere to yet fresher thought. For a writer time has already been given the go-ahead to think and ponder. The rest of us (those of us who do not write as a primary past time) think in task oriented settings, or receive flashes of news bits and conversations processed quickly and sequentially. We act on that information in small ways but mostly set it aside. We may not recall it ever or perhaps at specific moments in the future we bid its reappearance for use.

Aging, however, gives us license to explore things we didn’t have time to before now. And so we fiddle with memories because they are the most re-callable of past times.

Doing this, processing thoughts over and over again for whatever reason, allows new insights. But another looming reality appears as well: future as we once thought of it now has limits, parameters. It is no longer endless as we once thought of it. When young a year or 10 or 40 seem expansive and endless. Not so, of course. There are limits to most everything. Perhaps space is endless, but time? Somehow I intuit it is finite.

For me it is finite. For you as well, kind reader! Time is relative to each of us, but it is also very personal. Personal because time helps define me – place, companions, weather, atmosphere, age – past, present or future. We all have the present. We all have our unique past. But we all gaze into the ‘yet to be’ as future. We prepare for it. We sense it. We wonder how it will unfold.

At times I become aware that the future no longer stretches as far into the future as we would want. There is a limit. We are aware of that. Family and friends have died and their future ended right then. And we sense that in our own lives as well.

We don’t abandon the future, though. For those of us who have long planned for the future – its visions, problems, opportunities – we don’t abandon that process of pondering the future. Yes, it will extend beyond our time on earth, but we won’t be there to see if our conjuring were correct.

A little spring in the step is lost with that realization. It is not exactly the same as premonition of death. But it is knowing that outer limits do exist and will be encountered.

Believe me when I say this is sobering. But it does not sadden. Not in the least. It is just a fact of life we learn to face from time to time. It prepares us for eventualities.

It is hard to be human and not think of the future. At least it is hard for me to think in this way. But it is natural and it informs me of yet other dimensions of living that are important to ponder. Some of those dimensions I’ve already scratched their surfaces. So many more, however, remain to be touched and probed.

Let that journey begin!

August 3, 2015