Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3.1

We ought to consider not only that our life is daily wasting away and a smaller part of it is left, but another thing also must be taken into the account, that if a man should live longer, it is quite uncertain whether the understanding will still continue sufficient for the comprehension of things, and retain the power of contemplation which strives to acquire the knowledge of the divine and the human.

For if he shall begin to fall into old age, perspiration and nutrition and imagination and appetite, and whatever else there is of the kind, will not fail; but the power of making use of ourselves, and filling up the measure of our duty, and clearly separating all appearances, and considering whether a man should now depart from life, and whatever else of the kind absolutely requires a disciplined reason, all this is already extinguished.

We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them ceases first.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 3 (tr Long)

I have very fond memories of my great-grandfather. He would sing me Irish songs, tell me the most thrilling stories about his youth in Belfast, and reminisce about how he met my great-grandmother while traveling about England on his motorcycle. I especially remember the smell of his aftershave, and how he taught me to use silly putty to copy the comics from the Sunday newspaper. Mutt and Jeff was always his favorite.

Whenever he did something forgetful or foolish, my Nana would cry out, “Oh Huey!” He would turn to me with a grin, and say, “Ah, the mind is always the first to go with age!”

I hardly believed him, because I only noticed that older people appeared physically weaker, would lose their breath so easily, and had quite the time keeping up with my darting about here and there. His mind, however, seemed quite sharp, even as the frame of his body seemed worn and tired.

Decades after he passed away, I am beginning to understand what he meant. He had joked about it, as he did about most anything, but I suspect he saw how the clarity of his thinking was not what it used to be.

Though I am still quite younger now than he was then, I can sense something similar in myself. My thinking becomes sloppier, I forget what I should remember, and I make the most ridiculous errors of judgment. When I was younger, I made those mistakes because I was fiery and stubborn. Now I make them because I am slow and dull.

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

When I was young, I was foolish. I pursued the wrong trade, and I fell in love with the wrong girl. I will pay the price for both of those blunders until the end. In trying to turn myself around, and in striving to make something worthwhile of myself, I have also hesitated, made excuses, and put off what must be done. Regret in itself is pointless, but it does become worthy when it is a means for turning wrong into right, for fixing what I have broken.

There is never any guarantee that I have more time to make any good of those regrets. Yet the burden of age is not only that I will die, as much as I might want to deny it, or that I am getting weaker in my body, though they tell me there are apparently miracle pills for all of that.

The real burden of age is that my thinking itself becomes dull and hazy. The end of life for my body is hardly the point; the clarity of my mind is the key. Each day of procrastination and lazy excuses is a day of waste.

I saw my great-grandfather on a Sunday afternoon, and we watched a football game together. As was so usual way back then, the Patriots lost. He had a crippling stroke later that week, and the next time I saw him he seemed unaware of who I was, and he could not speak. They tied him to a bed or to a chair until his body died a year later. His soul had long been gone. Some company made quite a few bucks from maintaining a corpse.

I am myself a man sick in body. I was a bit surprised when fancy doctors told me that I had already gone through a few heart attacks, and that I was regularly suffering small strokes. I had always assumed it was just exhaustion, indigestion, or my usual bad mood. What the doctors told me worried me far less than the realization that my thinking was lagging well behind of my living.

Wise people always said I should never put off until tomorrow what I could do today. I get it now. I also get that it isn’t just about having a living body, but also about taking every opportunity I have to exercise a healthy mind. 

Written in 12/2016

Image: Leonardo da Vinci,  Self Portrait in Old Age (1512)