The Age Game

I recently read an article the other day about falling. The author had been out with her husband and another couple when she fell off the curb and onto the pavement. She was banged up and in need of medical attention the next day. Meetings were missed, naps were taken and a feeling of aloneness filtered into her being.

At once she realized there was now a difference in the way she lived. She held onto bannisters and reached for her husband’s arm during moments of uncertainty while walking along New York City’s crowded sidewalks. She stepped tentatively after it rained and especially after a snowstorm. Driveways had to be plowed and paths to and from the house had to be shoveled. Both could be treacherous to the unsuspecting. Who knew what lay under the white film of frozen crystals as they reformed into sheer ice?

And because of her uncertainty, the author had felt a great deal of shame and humiliation. She felt isolated and alone. Her husband couldn’t understand what it meant to be helpless or even infirm. What if a bone had been broken; her back or a leg? She’d be laid up for months without the ability to move around freely or easily. She’d have to have support. Perhaps a wheelchair or a walker; crutches even.

In fact, she’d be looked at as different, weird, sickly or even unable to move around without help. She’d be a burden. Who would want to be with someone who was a burden? She’d be old.

Ready to be tossed out like an old pair of shoes.

And that was where the truth hid. Someplace between healthy and young; old and infirm.

Truth was, she had to admit, if only to herself, the fall was the beginning of an idea she hadn’t had before.
Of aging and ill health.

As a woman who went to the gym every other day, did yoga and jazzercise, to be unable to move freely without pain, was her signal to pack her youth up and tuck it into the attic of past dreams. She was in the throws of a new phase of her life and had to accept it or stay locked out of the past youth she’d lived.

There would not be any future plans.

The fall represented aging and she wasn’t about to admit it. So, she did the next best thing. She felt shame and guilt and denial by trying to turn the fall into something less than the flow of life. She wasn’t giving her life the respect it needed in order to continue as a healthy human. Instead, the guilt and shame served as a panacea of denial and loss.

By falling, she lost her advantage of health and invincibility and took on a new persona of the wounded and aggrieved. She took it further and blamed.
Others.
Life.
Luck.
The duck walking across the field.

By taking on the act of blaming something, someone for what happened, she also gave her power away.

And, giving your power away is the surest way to the fragility of old age there is.

Once you give your power away, there is no other way to lay claim to a strong and visible identity.

You run the risk of invisibility because you’ve given up what matters most.