Getting used to it …
Misconceptions are two a penny in the 21st Century world and one of them is that this organ is for old people, which is not the case at all.
The Rust covers everything and anything – okay, many of its contributors are as old as the hills, but what’s wrong with that? We cannot help it, can we?
I was having a conversation the other day with a lady who will turn fifty this summer.
Whilst men and women have different perspectives upon life – and in many respects we can thank the Lord Almighty for that, it helps the world go around – and, of course, women have a reproductive ability that is time-limited in a manner that men’s is not – her main thrust was that she couldn’t quite believe that she’d been on the Earth that long.
I knew exactly where she was coming from.
I cannot recall now exactly when – it was probably about the age of ten – that I first worked out that in the year 2000 I would turn forty-nine and found the realisation completely incomprehensible in a “Nah, that’s never going to happen, is it?” sort of a fashion, probably based upon the fact that my parents, then aged 35 and 36 (youthful by any standards – well, it is when I’m now 68), seemed both so impossibly grown-up and ancient.
My chat with the soon-to-be-fifty lady moved on to how old we both felt.
Oldies like me sometimes refer to the notion that “old” is anyone older than we are and joke that adult human beings retain an instinctive delusional belief that they remain eternally thirty-eight at an absolute maximum – that is, unless and until the evidence staring back at ourselves in the mirror, or indeed the aches, pains and other vicissitudes of old age begin creeping up on us, at which point we are forced, eventually and unwillingly, to come to terms with the prospect of mortality and all it brings.
Attitudes have a lot to do with it.
I was told that I don’t act or seem like a nearly seventy-year-old, indeed few I consort with could believe my age when informed it, probably because I tend to treat all I come across just the same. Apparently, whether I talk to someone of eighty or eight, I am just myself: I don’t come across to others as someone of a different generation.
I think this was supposed to be a compliment.
A few months back I attended a ‘Fifty Years On’ school reunion from which I came away with decidedly mixed feelings.
On the one hand, it was good fun to see the old crowd again and have a natter about what we’d been doing all these years. But, on the other, I have to confess, I found the experience somewhat chastening and troubling.
Despite everyone being demonstratively still the same people – even though a few I hadn’t set eyes upon in the intervening half-century and some of them seemed to remain as they had been personality-wise back in 1969 – others (I’d estimate about a third of them) had changed almost beyond recognition … into stout-hearted, avuncular, old-fashioned individuals, in looks and interests at least a generation older than mine.
Another chap, ‘back in the day’ one of my closest school chums, was now bald, snow-white-haired, ruddy-faced, rheumy-eyed and – to be perfectly blunt, I kid you not – didn’t look a day under eighty-five.
All of the above has got me wondering since which of us had spent our lives being sensible – if you see what I mean – and which of us had spent ours being ill-advised and/or delusional.
Some seemed to have accepted whatever stage of life they had reached at any point and adapted to – and become comfortable in – it, whilst others had seemingly remained throughout ‘as they had always been’ but just (obviously) as the years went by grown older.
Over the weekend there were several stories in the media about different aspects of old age.
One of them was a report on the finding of research conducted by academics at the University of California in which they examined the rate of change occurring to the DNA of over 4,000 people aged 57 or above.
They had found some striking differences between biological and chronological age. At the far end of the scale, one 66 year-old was found to have a biological age of 114, whilst another 59 year-old was physically just 23.
This was all to do – and I’m out of my comfort zone here as regards the science – with what are called epigenetic changes: modifications to DNA that turn genes either ‘on’ or ‘off’.
Apparently with epigenetic changes, the DNA sequence remains unchanged, but cells begin to ‘read’ genes differently, like switching programmes on a washing machine or dimming a light.
Damaging environmental factors such as smoking, stress, pollution or obesity can cause the alterations and the culmination of epigenetic changes can be used like a clock to determine how fast a person is ageing.
Dr Eileen Crimmins, Professor of Gerontology, commented “People believe that the underlying process of ageing is one that underlies all the different health outcomes linked to age, such as cognitive decline, disease, disability, frailty and mortality”.
Other findings of the study were that being female slowed down the ageing clock by up to two years, whilst obesity speeded it up by up to eighteen months.
In addition, suffering psychological distress seemed to increase biological age by about four months and poor childhood health also accelerated the ageing process.
Elsewhere, in The Sunday Times, I came across a review by James McConnachie of a new book just out called The Changing Mind – A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Ageing Well by Daniel Levitin.
This examines what really works and why as regards keeping mentally fit in one’s later years.
And also what doesn’t – apparently taking up sudoku and “brain training” for example. All they do, according to Levitin, is make you better at playing those puzzles and games.
Instead, what assists most is “trying new things that require new ways of thinking”, e.g. taking up an instrument or social interaction (but not of the online variety because these are so inferior).
And loneliness is to be avoided – it is worse for your health than smoking 15 cigarettes per day.
Levitin is all for exercise, but it works best undertaken in natural environments, e.g. jogging through a wood with its constant distractions and hazards (overhanging branches etc.), which make the body and brain work far harder than if you’re just plodding away on a gym treadmill.
Memory is a key marker – apparently overall brain volume declines by 5% per decade from the age of 35!
Apparently human beings have always forgotten words, keys or what we went to a cupboard for.
When young, we attribute these to stress or tiredness. When old we – or those with us – suspect dementia.
Often oldies perform worse in memory tests simply because they are conducted in unfamiliar circumstances or odd times of the day.
According to Levitin, 93% of variations in cognitive tests between young and old are simply down to just poor eyesight or hearing.
Old age isn’t as bad as you might think, folks!
(Unless you let it be, perhaps) …
