THOUGHTS ON GETTING OLDER

Those of you who read my blog often know that I’m a collector of quotes, How about this one? “My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there” or “We make our future by the best use of the present”. I regret I don’t know who said these gems. One was in some notes I took during a lecture and I think the other one came from a line in a movie because I found it in the pile on my desk scribbled on a piece of a popcorn box. When I read them aloud to my daughter the other day she commented, “Wise words Mom, for any of us at any age.”

I’ve got a “big birthday” coming up soon and I figure that’s a good time to go through my collection of quotes from conversations I’ve recorded over the years. Learning from what they’ve said is making the best use of the present as I march into the future.

Phyllis Diller: “There are a great many joys to growing older. For one thing, you aren’t as impatient as you were as a child. You don’t throw and acorn on the ground and say. ‘Where’s my tree?’ You gain patience because you finally found out that things don’t happen overnight. So you are patient with other people and you’re patient with yourself and this is wisdom.”

Willy Nelson: “The older I get, the better I feel about things. There’s a lot to be picked up if you keep an open mind, an open spirit. There’s wisdom out there. I’ve learned patience. And I’ve learned to get out of the way, not try to make things happen but to just let them happen and accept them.  When you’re young you try to control everything; that’s where having life experience comes in. You find things that work and things that don’t work. It’s simple. You keep what works and drop what doesn’t. Over the years I’ve learned to just go with my instincts and trust them. The experience of living certainly has taught me something.”

Eve Merriam: “I think that a love for the ordinary is what is most important as one ages, not for the extraordinary. There are always trips to Bali or Yokohama or Paris, but to get the joy out of daily-ness, that’s what struck me. I thought, Good heavens, I’m getting so much pleasure out of my breakfast.  I didn’t know grapefruit juice could taste so good.  This is really amazing. It’s as though some kind of slight film over the world has been stripped away and there is now a clarity that I didn’t have before.”

Ossie Davis: “Age is that point of elevation from which it is easier to see who you are and what it is you want to do, and from which you find yourself closer to the very center of the universe. We never know if we’re truly wise. Yet age makes knowledge, tempers knowledge with experience, and out of that comes the possibility of wisdom.”

Hugh Downs: “I liken aging to a piece of fruit. You can go from green to rotten without ever ripening, and that’s tragic.  It’s important to mature, to ripen. I suppose that’s what I hope for – that I continue to ripen until it’s my time to go”

                        The gift of words is a wonderful present for a 75^th birthday.