The mirror of time in Daydreaming on the Porch

Lately, I've had some strange sensations, and it's all part of getting older, being past 60 and noticing, more than ever before, people my own age, or whom I perceive to be my own age. For the first time, really, I look at them and see old age coming -- people with gray hair, wrinkles and the appearance of someone well past middle age. I've seen them a thousand times before, but never before. It's astonishing. I looked at a couple walking downtown yesterday, for instance, and said, "That is me, walking at a pace I might walk at, seemingly fit, healthy, but still noticeably 60ish plus. What a shock! That's me."

This comes as a shock because I find it difficult to imagine myself being my actual age or any age, for that matter. And yet, I'm a baby boomer born in 1951. A person who looks nostalgically at books and magazines featuring articles and photos from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. (The 80s are a blur, a time when I was in a lot of inner turmoil, total uncertainty about where I was going in life, either unemployed, in graduate school, or working jobs that were temporary at best). In those years however, life still seems, despite all the troubles, to stretch infinitely out into the future. Now it most certainly doesn't. At least not infinitely in this life, on this Earth.

The point of all this is to write about a fact of life that must be accepted and assimilated. I think I look and act younger than I am, when I'm not, and don't. I cling to some familiar illusions of aging, and it's only human to do so. None of us want to get old. We can only hope we age gracefully and acquire the peace of mind and wisdom that comes with age eventually. It's a long, slow process and a very winding journey for me. "The long and winding road," as they say. I have much to remember and recall from the past and experience in the present that comforts me along the way. I have built tremendous fortresses for self-preservation and survival. I have untold coping mechanisms for most any slings and arrows that life can throw at me. Still, I feel I have a long ways to go, even as I realize I have available to me answers to life's most basic questions. I am wise and yet I am foolish. I am a vessel of clay containing the spiritual energy and wisdom of a universe.

As for the people on the street I see in passing, as if looking in a mirror, I imagine some of them have these same thoughts and that when they look at me, they also see themselves.