Age is a small price to pay for maturity

Ten Commandments for the Middle-aged

I got this from an email sent by Chitoism, but it contained 9 only; the complete commandments can be found in this blog:

1. Face and accept the reality of getting old, its consequences and the limitations which growing old brings. Act and behave your age. Quit fooling yourself by trying to look like you were in your youth.

2. Focus on enjoying people, not on indulging in or accumulating material things.

3. Plan to spend whatever you have saved. You deserve to enjoy it and the few healthy years you have left. Travel if you can afford it. Don't leave anything for your children or loved ones to quarrel about. By leaving anything, you may even cause more trouble when you are gone.

4. Live in the here and now, not in the yesterdays and tomorrows. It is only today that you can handle. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow may not even happen.

5. Enjoy your grandchildren (if you are blessed with any) but don't be their full time baby sitter. You have no moral obligation to take care of them. Don't have any guilt about refusing to baby sit anyone's kids, including your own grandkids. Your parental obligation is to your children. After you have raised them into responsible adults, your duties of child-rearing and babysitting are finished. Let your children raise their own off-springs.

6. Accept physical weakness, sickness and other physical pains. It is a part of the aging process. Enjoy whatever your health can allow.

7. Enjoy what you are and what you have right now. Stop working hard for what you do not have. If you do not have them, it's probably too late.

8. Just enjoy your life with your spouse, children, grandchildren and friends. People, who truly love you, love you for yourself, not for what you have. Anyone who loves you for what you have will just give you misery.

9. Forgive and accept forgiveness. Forgive yourself and others. Enjoy peace of mind and peace of soul.

10. Befriend death. It's a natural part of the life cycle. Don't be afraid of it. Death is the beginning of a new and better life. So, prepare yourself not for death but for a new life.

I'm Getting On with the Years and So are You . . .

Before I turned Golden Boy last year, I prepared myself for it by buying and reading up on books dealing with the middle age (reckoned by various sources as between the ages of 35 - 65, so I'm right smack in the mean, or is it median? However, Chicken Soup for the Golden Soup is meant for those sexagenarians - 60 year olds for you). I sure need a roadmap to navigate that part of my life's journey. If, as they say, life begins at 40, then I will be 11 this November. :-)
Time Flies by Bill Cosby. Filled to the brim with wit and wisdom. A sampling:

• I wear glasses, primarily so I can look for the things that I keep losing.
• I am just like any typical nuclear physicist. My office may look messy, but I know where every atom is.
• "Don't worry about senility," my grandfather used to say. "When it hits you, you won't know it."
• I remember my wife's birthday because she announces it well in advance and momentously, the way astronomers announce Halley's Comet.
• Instead of writing it (a message) down, I decide to keep it in my head, perhaps because of all the room for it there.
• I am not a physicist, but I'm sure that the theory of the conservation of energy was discovered while watching an eight-year-old pretend to work.
• In my old neighborhood, a boy stopped playing when he began to lose his pulse. And then he became the referee.
• Never let the younger people know that you think a compact disc is a sturdy spine; and never say to them, "That was before your time," because the last full moon was before their time.
• In spite of the profound love I have for my wife, sex at my age has become exhausting, which leaves me yearning for a younger body, or longing for a good nap.
• If you put a boyish face on a man of seventy-three who can't bend over, you have a new kind of centaur - and the horse's ass is the man who had the surgery.
• What I pray is that all the parts of me do not shut down all at once. What the man of fifty has to avoid is an orchestrated falling-apart.
• Immortality is a long shot, I admit; but somebody has to be first.
• There is a saying that goes: Youth is a gift of nature; Age is a work of art. Well, I hate to disagree with Confucius or Hallmark, but if age is a work of art, the artist is one who belongs in the subway and not in the Louvre.
• Memory has a sugarcoater and we can never remember pain. (If women could remember pain, we would be a nation of single-child families)
• You can teach an old dog new tricks. You just don't want to see the dog doing them.

When My Parents were My Age, They were Old (Or Who are You Calling Middle-aged?) by Cathy Crimmins. Very funny justapositions between our parents' middle age and our middle age like: while our parents start to go gray and dye their hair, we begin putting highlights in ours to enhance its natural shine.

Body checklist for the mature: you use tweezers in places you've never thought before, you notice that dim lighting makes you look at least three years younger, sucking in your guts starts to feel natural, when you play sports you care less about winning than about finishing the game without getting hurt.

The Big Five-Oh! - Facing, Fearing and Fighting Fifty by Bill Geist.
Bill Geist takes comfort in the statistics that everyday 11,000 hits the big five-oh (one every 7 1/2 seconds). He starts his book with 50 ways to tell you're 50; here's some :
takes three times to call own kids by correct names, can't read menu, plays air-guitar to unplugged songs, ear hair, can't see own dick, leaves turn signal on, says "eh" and "huh" a lot, falls asleep (rather than passes out) at parties.


Ten Things I Wish I'd Known Before I Went out into the Real World by Maria Shriver. Armed with her Kennedy toothy trademark, Maria Shriver gives us a mouthful to wish we'd known before it's too late for us: pinpoint your passion, no job is beneath you, who you work for and with is as important as what you do, your behavior has consequences, be willing to fail, superwoman is dead...and superman may be taking viagra, children do change your career, marriage is a hell of a lot of hard work, don't expect anyone else to support you financially, and have lots of laughter in your life.