Age signals – A story by Peter Seitz

Winter is the best time to think about this. When it gets dark outside early, the meagre daylight is only brightened by the room lighting, dog walkers do their last round at 4pm and their first at 9am (the dogs must have enviable bladders), then it’s not difficult to bring up the subject:

“Age is just a number. You are as old as you feel. You always stay young at heart. The soul doesn’t age. We don’t get together that young anymore. We meet again in old freshness”. Or much, much more beautifully in Hermann Hesse’s step-by-step poem: ‘…. Every stage of life blooms, every wisdom blooms and every virtue blooms in its own time and cannot last forever’. Oh, how many sayings there are about this.

But – facts count. At some point you realise that you are getting older. Imperceptible things creep in. As if subconsciously. A gradual process.

Example: On any normal day, which is full of the usual things and doesn’t initially cause you any headaches, you have the irresistible urge to relax on the sofa. Why should you feel guilty about it? You’ve worked like a blacksmith all your life, maybe you even have – and then no siesta? That would be even nicer.

Does you good. Half an hour, then off again to new activities. That’s how it starts. After two or three repetitions, it becomes a habit that is remembered on the next occasion. Even if they are attending a lecture in the university lecture theatre. The sofa beckons, inviting and with a cosy blanket, welcoming you like a warm-hearted mother.

An hour used to be enough to regenerate. Now you have to regenerate all the time. You don’t get to do anything else. You only get to rest on selected days when everything has to be just right: Weather, appetite, exercise, not forgetting the evening, when you finally get to discuss and experience everything that’s good with your sweetheart.

The positive thing is that time becomes more time. More like before, of course, in relation to the shrinking future. However, subjectively, after decades of time pressure, we finally have plenty of time. Appointments can be made blindly, unless you happen to catch a public holiday. The last round in the wine bar, around 0.30 a.m., can be enjoyed happily, after all, you don’t have to get up at 6.00 a.m.. Is that perhaps nothing? A lot, actually.

And the great thing is that nobody knows – and that’s a good thing – how much of the future is still to come. So a certain youthful, relaxed approach to age signalling is called for.

By the way, my mother-in-law will be 100 in a fortnight and her favourite pastime is annoying her nurses. It keeps her young. It’s also supposed to be good for the brain.

Peter Seitz is a neighbour in the neighbourhood and likes to write stories. He wrote this story for the neighbourhood newspaper.