Life comes at you fast

 

Age is an issue of mind over matter.

If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. – Mark Twain

I stole that title from the series of sermons Russ Peterman is preaching at University Christian Church in Fort Worth. Dr. Peterman means it in the sense that life goes by so quickly: one minute you’re sixteen and the next you’re a senior citizen. I give the phrase a different twist: life can throw you curve balls one after another. That’s what it felt like to me this week.

Mainly my woes were linked to my computer. When I went to wake it one afternoon (we’d both had a nap), Microsoft demanded a password. When I supplied that, it announced my wireless keyboard needed updating. I pressed the proper button and was told it couldn’t connect. Did I want to skip the update? I did. And just like that, my keyboard quit working and began flashing red and green lights.

I checked Microsoft support but when a man in Africa wanted my contact information, I demurred, and when he wanted to take control of my computer, I ended the session. So I am using my laptop keyboard, which just doesn’t work for me. The cursor jumps all over the place, puts letters and words where I don’t intend them, and just lost an entire paragraph. Sigh.

Meantime, MacAfee alerted me that information from one email account had been found on the dark web, and Google Analytics warned that I only have a limited amount of time to transfer to their new system. Colin advised changing the email account password, and I decided to ignore Google Analytics since I never use it—thanks to Subie for that bit of advice. Colin also warned to be careful of answering such threatening emails because there are a lot of look-alikes out there.

There was still the keyboard problem: I ordered a cheap one from Amazon, but when I started to install it, I realized it was not as good as the one I had. It required AA batteries whereas the now defunct one plugged into a USB port. And the mouse is much better fitted to your hand. My fault for going cheap. Today Jamie ordered one just like I had, to be delivered tomorrow. Can’t wait.

My new teakettle is working and if I could get the electric garbage can working and the keyboard installed, all might be well in my electronic worled. Yes, I know. First-world problems.

Back to Dr. Peterman’s sermons: I am anxious to hear what he has to say about the last stage of life. In the first publicity for the series, he referred to childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old adulthood. I howled in protest, telling him I did not want to be called an old adult. He said it was a typo, should have been older, but he recognized that wasn’t much better. Later, he emailed that he had once served in a church where the senior citizens called themselves Third Agers. I agreed that was better.

By serendipity friends and I have been talking about age. Subie and Phil were here last night (they praised my new hearing aids, said I picked up everything they said with the implication that I usually don’t) and we decided we didn’t feel elderly. I usually say that I feel like I’m in my thirties—those were happy days, with four babies and what I thought was a happy marriage. In retrospect I’m happier now than I was then, but still, thirty is a good way to feel. I think Subie said she feels even younger, and we agreed we know people younger than us who are older. Then again, I read of people older than me who are younger—I simply am not about to ride a horse or a bicycle again, let alone jump out of an airplane or enter a marathon dancing contest. I did recall the time I told Jamie I didn’t feel any different than the coeds on campus (this was years ago when I was working on campus and probably he was in school). He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard and laughed until I wanted to bop him one.

But what I’m working toward is that barring catastrophic illness age is in large part a matter of your mind. How you think of yourself affects the face you present to the public and the way people respond to you. It dictates how you look, how you walk, and certainly how you think.

Barbara, my BFF from high school, and I have corresponded a bit this week about another aspect of aging: growing wiser. We learn to accept, and we learn—oh, this is a hard lesson—not to try to control but to watch how others react and think and behave. Self-acceptance is a big part of growing old gracefully. You simply don’t have to rescue the world or even change it, though Lord knows in some ways I’m still trying.  But in some indefinable way, my soul is now more at peace than it ever was. I like the way Gwyneth Paltrow said it: “The best thing about getting older is that you become more comfortable in your own skin.”

Now I’m anxious for the last Sunday of the month and the last sermon in the series, to hear what Dr. Peterman says about the third age or stage.

We have one hour to go under a sever thunderstorm watch and it doesn’t look like it is going to happen. We surely don’t need the severe part, but some rain would be so welcome.