Image via Wikipedia'You don’t know about me.....' Those famous few words written by Mark Twain all those years ago certainly applies to me. I am a blogger that writes for you on a regular basis but finding out who I really am is harder than it appears. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck said, "YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." We are all a little bit Huckleberry Finn, even as we get old, trying to find our way in a world that does not necessarily understand who we are or what we really need or want. You can't know without you have read the book of our life!
I have often wondered about blogs written by young people about getting old. Are they pretending to be young but are really old? How could they possible know what it is like to live in the skin of a 70 or 80 year old person. No book can explain it and if a professor sums it up in 5000 words, he has not even come close. Trust me young people. You need to listen to your clients/patients when they verbalize their pain and concerns. There is a lifetimes worth of observations inside their heads and they are just trying to make you understand.
10 Things about old people!
- We are much happier that you would expect.
- If you were not to remind us, we would feel young for a very long time.
- When we offer advice we really do know what we are talking about.
- Old people fall in love and like to dance!
- If we were bad people when we were young, we still are bad people.
- We don't like to be reprimanded...respect dictates that you will over look our failings just as we have over looked yours.
- You are not responsible for our actions. If we make a fool of ourselves we are the only ones that should feel embarrassed.
- In order for a person to be old that person has to give the "old" permission to come and live in their bodies and minds.
- When we look really bad and forget to put the milk in the fridge don't begin to search for nursing homes. We are going to live a lot longer that your can even imagine.
- We would still like to play hopscotch!
You see, inside the skin of every aged man and woman lives a world of experience, joy, pain and age. They are at once old and that child of long ago, happy and sad, afraid and brave, cautious and bold. All the things they have been during their lives remain in a drawer stored away in their brain...names and places, phone numbers and addresses, relative long dead but never forgotten, friends and enemies, lies and truths, sins and virtues. It is all there. Even the locations of those keys they misplaced 30 years ago is stored away somewhere in that mind and may reemerge some dark night when they least expect it.
I recently told my daughter that I needed to be sheltered from those things that make she and her brothers uneasy. "I know too much." I told her. When they share with me, I offer unwanted advice or cautions. If you took what I have seen happen and applied it to every situation involving our grandchildren, none of them would have survived. So all I could think to say was "Please don't tell me." Even my own children can never really "know me".
Is there a point to this. Yes there is. When you want to know about another person, you really do need to walk in their shoes for a day or a year. It is the only way to understand what has gone on in their life. The story about aging is no different.
Just a thought.
b (aged 68)
