I was surprised at how fast it happened.  There is a series of experiences that I have mentally labelled “getting old.” But, as you see, the difference between getting old and being old is as clear as the difference between being on a journey and arriving at a destination.  I am now at the destination.

By “old,” I am going to mean the way I experience it.  It isn’t another way to say decrepit.  “Decrepit” is just Latin for “broken down.”  I did not suddenly become broken down.  On the other hand, just what is broken on any given day is more salient than it once was.

I used to say that I began a day by “calling a play.”  I am the quarterback of my team, in this metaphor.  Then I adapt the play based on the abilities and the conditions of the members of the team.  I have vertigo, for example, and for the purposes of brevity, let’s say it is a problem of the inner ear.  Sometimes it is active; other times it lurks at the periphery of awareness.  I call a play and the middle ear says “I can’t provide any guarantee of your standing up for that long at one time.”  The left calf (intermittent cramping) says, “That play runs twice as long as I can go.”  And so on.  And I modify the play to utilize the present condition of the available players.  That’s not what I am calling “old.”

“Old” is when I gather my resources in the team huddle and see who is there.  Until I know whose help I can count on, I don’t even make notes in my date book.  When a new resource shows up—no dizziness at all so far today!—I call a play I had hesitated to call before.

But “being old” is more than that.  It is a mental construct, for one thing, not a physical condition.  And it is a place where my mind starts, not a condition to which it adapts.  I would not, for example, decide to start a project or enhance a relationship and then think, “Oh wait.  I’m too old for that.”  Rather, I would start with “OK, I’m old.  Given that, can I start a project like this or work on a relationship like that?”

“Starting with old” is what I mean by “being old.”  I started doing that only recently.  Who would have thought it?  And it has required the reconsideration of some patterns of thought I have really enjoyed.  

When I moved into a Senior Center ten years ago, I was really intrigued by the number of people who excused their actions—more often, their inactions—with the tag line, “I’m Old, You Know.”  It sounded so routine and so practiced that I made a game out of it.  This is a “game” in the Games People Play sense.  It joins, NIGYYSOB (Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch), which is one of the best known of Eric Berne’ s“games.”  I called it IOYK (I’m Old You Know).

And I still think most of those IOYK namings were correct.  But now I realize that there is an alternative.  It is not “old” as an excuse; it is the naming of the initial mental condition of the which the person was aware.  Maybe preemptively aware. It is, in other words, “starting with old.”  It is, at those times, beginning with the mental awareness of age—not of decrepitude—and saying or doing things that require that initial premise.  That’s not really IOYK.  It’s just being old.

Like me.