Is Ageing all in the Mind?

A friend of mine sent me an article: “Can you trick your ageing body into feeling younger?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11284180
I am not sure what she meant by sending me this. (What would you think if a  woman - significantly younger in years - sent you such an article?) The thing is, when it comes to unpleasant things like ageing, my best line of defence is simply “denial”. But when things are shoved into your face through a slot in your inbox, it makes it harder to ignore.

The article relates to an experiment designed to test the hypothesis first put out by Professor Ellen Langer of Harvard University: “If elderly people dress, live and talk as they did in their heyday, will they feel younger and fitter? “ Yes, the same disturbing image flashed through my mind - that of a group of elderly people dressed up as hippies, or even worse - in 70’s garb and hairdo, speaking in what was once considered “cool”  slang.

But the experiment has at least spared us this disturbing spectacle.  It was designed to make a group of elderly people feel younger by recreating an isolated world resembling what they had left behind 35 years before, and placing them in this world for a week. I am not going to go into the details of this experiment. Let’s just say that there were positive results. You can read the rest by yourselves (and then look for your old beads and dried flowers in the attic).

But let’s continue with a few more words about ageing.

I do believe that ageing is in the mind. (Tell that to my receding hairline.) Okay, let me reword this: the "effect of ageing" is in the mind. Some things - such as receding hairlines -  we have no control over. But do we need artifacts from the past in order to trigger this anti-ageing process? Perhaps it wasn’t the recreated world of younger years at all, but merely the introduction of radical change which made the participants feel younger. We definitely feel older when we become stuck in a rut, and get up in the morning with really no expectation from the day. Change brings about new challenges and opportunities. We must exercise our minds and imaginations in order to cope with these new stimuli, even if these are things that we experienced long ago. One might even hypothesize that if a whole new world were created for us - with nothing there that we recognize, neither from the past nor the present - that the results of our feeling younger might be about the same as those in the experiment - perhaps even better.

Another thing that might be interesting to compare is the ageing process of “expats” to that of people who have grown up and lived in the same culture and spoken the same language all of their lives. Would we find any sort of definitive pattern there? Change is also  involved here - at first radical change which slowly evens out over the years.

But let’s leave our physical surroundings for a moment and concentrate on chemistry. Does the intimate interaction with others lessen the ageing process? Yes, I know what you’re thinking. But this doesn’t necessarily relate to an older man dating a younger woman - although Woody Allen would argue its benefits, first in his movie Manhattan and then in his own personal life. I personally cannot argue the merits of such an arrangement, mainly because of a lack of experience.  I do have a good friend, though, who dated much younger women between marriages. I asked him once what was the cutoff point (as to how young she could be). He said, “Well, if she doesn’t know who the Beatles are, that pretty well says it all.”
 
But our intimate interaction with others needn’t necessarily be of romantic or sexual nature. I have two very close friends in Canada and when I return to Canada for visits, we always get together. And I must say, that without any conscious effort, we keep each other young. We see each other and ourselves as we always have. This was perhaps best summed up in a dream that G (one of these two friends)  had.
“I had this dream last night. I was standing by P’s car talking to P (he was sitting in the car). I looked into the rear view mirror and P and I looked just as we did at the age of 18. I was so excited that I wanted to run and find you and see how you looked. But at that moment, I woke up.”
 
I would gladly go into the interpretation of this dream further (when I was 14, I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and it soon became my hobby to interpret my friends’ dreams, something that I still do now and then), but we will leave it at that for now and move on.

And in moving on, let’s get back to things shoved through the slot of the mailbox. One thing that I don’t like receiving are those so-called cute attempts at humour about ageing (sent to me by people who are at an age when they feel they can personally relate to such things): “You know you are getting old when...” and so on.  I agree that humour: satire and the ability to laugh at yourself, is an essential requirement for a healthy physique. However I see no benefit whatsoever in laughing about getting old. If we have come to some sort of agreement that the effect of ageing is in the mind, then succumbing to jokes about how ageing is diminishing our physical and mental capacity is raising the white flag. Why don’t you just shoot me, instead?

But then maybe I am just becoming a grumpy old man.
.

Discussions with a Muse

“She never married, you know.”
The room was quiet, darker than usual, the only light coming from the glow of the screen. I stopped writing and squinted into the darkness.
“Who?” I asked.
“S...  You remember S. Your first love?”
I remembered. Some things you can’t forget.
“Are we using initials now?”
“You never know who’s listening,” she answered.
“And I thought I was paranoid.”
I could feel her smiling, even though I couldn’t see her.
“How do you know she never got married?”
“I have my ways.” She paused... one of those dramatic little pauses that she was so fond of. “No children, either.”
“And you are telling me this because...” I looked back into the screen, trying to remember what it was I was writing.
“I thought you should know. You never know how far your influence may reach.”
“My influence!” I stared incredulously into the darkness, but it was lost on her. “What do I have to do with her not being married? These things happen.”
“Whatever.”
I found her tone a little suspicious.
“Can I go back to my writing, now?”
“Another book?”
“Yes.”
I heard her sigh. And then silence. I reached for the mouse, hoping she had left.
“M never got married either.”
I slumped back into my chair and pushed the mouse away.
“You are not going to let it be, are you.”
“Should I?”
I sighed. The room was stuffy, despite the darkness. I needed to open a window. I couldn’t remember if there was one.
“No children either.”
“Coincidence,” I countered.
“So you say.”
“Look, I have to get this done,” I said, leaning forward, the chair squeaking.
“Before you lose your inspiration?” She had me there. “Do you remember the day you made A cry? Just before she left to go live... where was it?”
“The other side of the world.” I gave up and lowered the lid of the laptop until it snapped shut. Now the room was totally enveloped in darkness. “No, don’t tell me. She never got married either.”
“You’re getting it now.” Even I, with my well-developed sense of denial, could not but feel that this was the beginning of a pattern. “She was a sweet girl,” she said. “She must have been the sweetest of your girlfriends.”
“How would you know? You weren’t there.”
“I’ve been watching the reruns.”
I shook my head and looked down at the computer, which had given in to her ramblings. Yes, she had been a sweet girl, and yes, it had been criminal of me to even think I could be a proper boyfriend at the time. Or maybe I didn’t think, but simply let things sweep me wherever they would go. No, I couldn’t let her trick me into believing that my influence could stretch that far. I raised the lid and tried to hide behind it, waiting as the computer whirred slowly back to life. It was reassuring to hear something other than our own voices.
“No one is ever going to read this,” I said, as the letters began dancing across the screen.
“Hey, that’s my line.”
“What?”
“In the book. That’s my line in the book.” she protested.
“What does the book have to do with now?”
“The book has everything to do with now. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the book,” she said.
“I think you have things mixed up.”
“Do I?”
And with that, she was gone, as suddenly as she had appeared.

I wonder if confusion breeds good writing. Was that the reason why it took me so long to write a blog and a book? There had not been enough confusion in my life?

I have been trying to make some sense out of life, ever since I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams at the tender age of 14. I practiced on my friends, interpreting their dreams, which added to their confusion, but alleviated mine. I discovered that by remaining cold and analytical, I could somehow overcome the bouts of depression which continually swept over me at this age. I decided to adopt the strict Stoic philosophy of controlling one’s emotions. I didn’t realize, at the time, that in order to eradicate the destructive emotions, the positive ones had to go as well. And then one day... A cried...  yearning for the colours that she sensed were in me - where all she got were the multitude of greys.

How can we know how much we influence others? So much else is involved. A hundred things could have convinced S and M and A not to get married, none of them connected to me. True, A told me that last evening, tears streaming down her cheeks, that she should have chosen my best friend instead. One might say that this error in judgement may have prevented her from trusting her instinct in any future, possibly long term relationship. But we were so young then. So many years have passed by since.

“Why should I feel guilty?” I said out loud, needing to be heard. “It’s not as if I couldn't commit myself. I've been married for over 30 years!”
“And you only had to change country, language, religion and culture first.”
“I thought you had left,” I said.
“I forgot the punch line.”

The room looked the same when she was there, and when she wasn't. I wondered how that could be.“Anyway," it was my turn to protest, "you shouldn’t belittle this accomplishment. Do you know that I was voted the person most unlikely ever to get married or have children in my graduating class.”
“Why would you ever want to have children in your graduating class?”
“I...” I sighed and looked around for my glass of whiskey. If it was there, it was buried somewhere underneath black shades of nothing.
“I suppose you want a medal now for staying married,” she said. “Does your wife know?”
“Know what? That we’re still married?”
“No. That there are a slew of former unmarried girlfriends standing out there, waiting in line.”
“Waiting for what?”
“You figure it out. It’s time for me to go.”