Tuesday, June 7, 2011

A Little Here, A Little There 1001;19

Romeo and Juliet are the famous, tres young  lovers who die over broken hearts, mixed signals, and other relatively-easily remedied issues which any one could succumb to before we age and get some smarts.  Like:  family opinions can be negotiated, broken hearts can be mended, life can go on. 

However.  In order to learn these great truths, we learn that we have to learn through painful experience.  Tit for tat.  In order to get it, we have to give it up.

Getting older means (we posit) gaining knowledge, wisdom, peace, heartbreak, patience, chutzpah, etc., all for the price of losing a lot of other things: languor, temper, virginity, cortisone, etc.  Some of the things lost are small: eyeglasses, false friends.  Some are a little bigger (depending on how we do the rating): jobs, vision, waistlines.  These losses come gradually over the years, if we're lucky, and we adapt to them.

It seems that the losses get bigger and faster down the road.  Maybe this is not true; maybe it is just that losses become harder to take when the resilience of youth is lost.  Maybe Old Age is another form of adolescence, with the difficulty of adjusting to the awkward growing-into-lifestage--only with Old Age-olescence, its a growing-out of lifestage. 

A salesclerk--who was kindly helping me buy clothes to compensate for my fast-changing self image--and I touched on this topic the other day, between my trips to the changing room.  We initiated our short relationship with a discussion on losing our old "colors"---that changing skin tones and hair colors required us to find other colors to flatter our fading features and shifting muscles and maintain our hold on grooming as we know it in this century (thank God its changed since the last century, with bouffant hairstyles and girdles and other unpleasant stuff).  Styles of clothing have shifted; some from our heyday are even back in style--although not for us.  Age requires a shift in body image and fashion, we agreed. Its great to talk to someone who works with clothes and backs me up on this suspicion that things are changing on all fronts.  Its not just my mirror getting weird, not just me, but my peer group.  The comfort of the herd is a great thing.

So loss is a given, and the returns get harder to appreciate.  The big losses, especially, defy Pollyanna.  Ultimately, friends, spouses, everybody we know becomes a loss, unless we beat them to the punch and die first.  There really isn't any redeeming factors I can see in losing people you know or love.  The best I can make out of this lemon is that all those years of losing things actually has prepared me, a little bit, to face the fact that life is all about letting go.  Of everything. 

Since this is the case, its a good idea to keep hoping that we can avoid the biggest hits, and enjoy the things that don't go away.  Like smiles, beautiful days, a good book, cats, people who fill in the spaces, cortisone replacement, and hey I just found out about Retinol. 

Learning to deal with losses, therefore, could be one of the greatest things to teach kids--as long as its always backed up with hope.  Hope that things can get better, down to the very last loss.  That, my friends, requires all the muscle that any old heart has developed over a lifetime.

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