It's all in your head

My grandma ("Nanny" for the Italians in the house) used to never tell anyone her age. Not even my mother truly knew how old Nanny was, and I think Nanny may have actually lied about her age to my mom. Anyway, now that she's reached a certain age, she seems proud of the fact that she's 86 (if that is, in fact, her real age). Except instead of saying "I'm 86!", it's more like "I'm 86 and I don't know how much longer I'm going to live."

I firmly believe that you're only as old as you want to be, as you believe you are. Next month, I'll be 27, but I still feel like that gawky 16 year old high school kid sometimes. I think I'll always be 16 at heart.

Since I've come to New York, I've become addicted to The New Yorker. (Seriously, I don't think there's anything about NYC I don't like). What I love about The New Yorker is that everything is written beautifully. I came across an editorial that I think describes perfectly the virtues of growing old. So instead of counting down the days until we die, and lamenting about turning 86 or 27, we should be treasuring what we're learning as we grow older and feeling young at heart. Here's an excerpt:

"...People tend to regard the gradual yet irreversible atrophying of their faculties as a bad thing. Is it, though? Sure, it's tied up with stuff that you don't want to think too much about. One day, you learn that you can't hear a sound that is perfectly audible to teenagers and dogs. Soon after that, you realize that you have forgotten how to calculate the area of a triangle, and how many pints there are in a quart. From there, it's not long until you find that you are unable to stop talking about real estate, which is the first step down an increasingly rocky and overgrown path that leads, almost always - all right, always - to death. What is there to like about any of this?

"...The point is that mental and physical development never stops, no matter how old you are, and development is one of the things that make it interesting to be a being. We imagine that we change our opinions or our personalities or our taste in music as we ripen, often feeling that we are betraying our younger selves. Really, though, our bodies just change, and that is what changes our views, our temperament, and our tolerance for Billy Joel. We can't help it. The chemistry has altered.

"This means that some things that were once present to us become invisible, go off the screen; the compensation is that new things swim into view. We may lose hormones, but we gain empathy. The deficits, in other words, are not all at the end of the continuum..."