On Learning To Love Growing Old

You start growing gray hair, your skin is not as supple as it used to be. Your vision turns bad, your hearing is not that good anymore. You are growing old. So what? No big deal. Growing old has other "perks." Here are 8 of them.

Photolink

1. You gain increased independence coupled with decreased mobility. When you were young, all you wanted to be was to grow up to gain independence. Now that you have the independence, you can't get to places you want to be because of obligations and responsibilities, topped with decreased joint mobility.

2. You learn to love sleeping. Remember how much you hated it when your mother forced you to take an afternoon nap? If you had known then that you would be sleep-deprived in adulthood, you would have taken a century worth of sleep when you were a child.

3. You become aware of unseen body parts that were unknown to you as a child. As an adult, your knowledge of human anatomy has gone beyond "head, shoulders, knees and toes." You now know that you have all sorts of glands, most of which go crazy and cause your current health issues.

4. You now can be proud to have a richer vocabulary. Words now have more than one meaning. For example, "Lumps" as a child meant you had a bad fall. "Lumps" in an adult can mean something else. 

5. You get to have in-depth knowledge of the word "Ache." As a child, the only "aches" you knew of were tummy ache and toothache. As an adult, you get to experience headache, heartache, joint ache, back ache and a whole lot of aches.

6. Excellence is something you try to stay away from. As a child, bagging an academic excellence award means a new toy, a new dress, monetary rewards, a dream vacation or a family dinner in a fancy restaurant. In adulthood, excellence at work would mean promotion, which means you will be given more work.

7. You look forward to retirement. It amuses you to watch young adults scrambling to land their dream job and make a mark. You shake your head and mutter to yourself, "Been there. Done that."

8. The best part of growing old is not counting how many years you have been alive. It is in collecting, treasuring and reminiscing all the good times and life lessons you had along the way. 

Photolink