I’m getting old. I can tell because of the way I have to ask my kids to do things like get a new SIM card to install and work in my phone, or put a new app on the TV. And I can feel their impatience, although they dedicatedly try to explain how it works every time they show me, my brain just refuses to take in “you press this, then this, then go to this option, select number 3, then press this and go back to the main screen” when it’s delivered at breakneck speed.
Because inside, I’m still 20. Well, 30, then. And I’m lucky, because I’m still fit and active, with a day job and a dog and friends, and more to do than I can squeeze into an average day, so my body and brain can keep up the pretence that I’m not really getting old, as such, just older.
And old age is a privilege. I’ve plenty of friends and relations who never got there, so I try to embrace the whole ageing process as just another natural part of life that you don’t have to like but which is a positive thing – like cutting your toenails or cleaning the windows. I find myself wondering when I will actually start to feel ‘old’. Some mornings, when I get up after a late shift at work and an inadequate night’s sleep, and totter down the stairs feeling about a hundred, or when I’ve been ill and I don’t shrug off the symptoms in a couple of days like I used to, I wonder if this is it. Am I now old? But then I get out for a run and come back full of energy (sweaty, purple faced and wishing for death, but there’s energy too) and think, nope. Still got it. Still young, if only at rapidly-beating heart.
So in The Recipe for Happiness I’ve tried to show that being old doesn’t mean moribund. You can be over 70, hell, you can be over 90, and still have a lust for life, you just have a bit less ability to take that lust and turn it into action. Plus, people try to stop you by saying “you’re too old for that”. My characters know that you are never “too old for that”, whether that is trying new foods, getting out to new places or, indeed, starting a rock band. Age is a state of mind. Arthritis and back problems might slow you down, and you may need a touch more augmentation through spectacles, new teeth or a replacement hip, but while the spirit is willing, the flesh can have a damned good try at keeping up.
Even my mother, who died with dementia, kept a youthful outlook and a willingness to get out and experience the world, right to the end. So I tend to subscribe to the theory that age really is a state of mind. You’re as young as you feel.
Rock on!
Pick up your copy of The Recipe for Happiness today: https://mybook.to/recipehappinesssocial