The music of an ageing man

Having entered the latter half of my sixties, I view each day as a bonus. People much younger become obituaries these days around me. That awareness helps me to sober down in spite of the youthful rush of blood in my indignant veins.

Age hasn’t withered my indignation against injustice, fraudulence, and blatant human folly, much as I would like to withdraw from the ringside and watch the pugilism from a balcony seat with mellowed amusement. But my genes rage against my will. The one who warned me in my folly-ridden youth to be wary of my (anyone’s, for that matter) destiny-shaping character was farsighted. I failed to subdue the rages of my veins. I still fail.

That’s how some people are, I console myself.

So, at the crossroads of my sixties, I confess to a dismal lack of emotional maturity that should rightfully belong to my age. The problem is that the sociopolitical reality around me doesn’t help anyway to soothe my nerves. On the contrary, that reality is almost entirely responsible for my rages and outrages. My writing is an exercise in psychological sublimation.

No, I’m not here to make any confession or seek any sympathy. I’m only responding to Blogchatter’s blog hop theme.

Age hasn’t inflicted my flexibility with stiffness yet. I’m glad for that. Aches aren’t afflicting my energy. Health checkups haven’t become a routine. Good going, right?

There’s more yet. I’ve realised that masculinity is no longer about professional success or physical strength or social dominance. I have faded into the little world of my home and am happy there. I’m authentic. And that means a world to me – in a world that offers and values spurious truths.

I don’t long for connections any more. Nor do I fear isolation. My personal world has thinned into a quiet truth which doesn’t long for echoes. The silence in my personal space has a music that I love.

That music carries the cadences of all the choices I made and those I failed to. It is punctured by the thorns of the paths I took and the losses of those that I ignored for various reasons, mostly personal inability. It has the melodies of both my failures and triumphs. Alas, it also has the pains I inflicted on myself as well as others, some avoidable and much inevitable.

Age has carried me beyond regrets towards understanding. I will arrive at tranquillity sooner rather than later, I hope. I only need to turn a deaf ear to the sound and fury out there.

Blogchatter’s Blog Hop wanted me to “use a treasured photograph as a cue to explore what aging means” to me. There are too many of them in my ageing albums. One’s enough here.

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