The fear of the umpires finger
February 26th 2007 09:40
For the life of me I can't understand why people have this fear of looking in the mirror and finding an extra wrinkle around the eyeline, a grey hair near the temple or finding that you need to wear glasses fulltime. What is it about ageing that frightens people so much so that a whole new industry has sprung up around trying to keep people not only looking young but attempting to keep young as well? Pills, surgery, creams. They're all there to make us all feel like we 're supposed to live longer and healthier too! The body just like eveything else tends to breakdown over a period of time, and the longer someone lives the more likely their body will no longer be their own. A plastic hip on the left, some screws there, a pacemaker over there, remove this, put in this to make this look larger.
The way I see it is that we're born we grow up, grow old (well for some they don't get the chance to grow old) and we die. That's it folks, we're born to die. Like it or not, we're not supposed to live forever. Can you imagine if all of the people who had ever died (of either natural causes such as disease or old age) were still living? Life would be pretty crowded wouldn't it? Some people want to inexplicably stay around forever, I don't. I figure that if someone wants to watch centuries of history unfold, thats fine. Count me out. I'm quite happy to die someday and make room for someone else. Along the way if my hair turns grey, or it (along with my teeth) drop out, I get wrinkled and saggy, and my joints ache, then I'm just going to accept it as my lot of getting old. I'm not going to refer to myself as "80 years young" because I won't be. I won't be afraid to say that I'm old, not older, just old.
People just don't want to die. Now I'm not afraid of death, I'm just afraid of getting there. Everybody has some trepidation about it, even me, but I'm resigned to the fact that it will happen. People think that if they can hold off the ageing process then perhaps they can fool father time into giving them a little more on the field to bat. I don't think he's fooled by some dyed hair and a plastic hip because once our innings is over it's over. Once the umpire has raised his finger we head off into the great pavillion in the sky, but the game goes on and in all of our yesterdays it's not whether how many runs we made, or whether we played at andmissed the ball more than we hit it, it's how we played the game.
The way I see it is that we're born we grow up, grow old (well for some they don't get the chance to grow old) and we die. That's it folks, we're born to die. Like it or not, we're not supposed to live forever. Can you imagine if all of the people who had ever died (of either natural causes such as disease or old age) were still living? Life would be pretty crowded wouldn't it? Some people want to inexplicably stay around forever, I don't. I figure that if someone wants to watch centuries of history unfold, thats fine. Count me out. I'm quite happy to die someday and make room for someone else. Along the way if my hair turns grey, or it (along with my teeth) drop out, I get wrinkled and saggy, and my joints ache, then I'm just going to accept it as my lot of getting old. I'm not going to refer to myself as "80 years young" because I won't be. I won't be afraid to say that I'm old, not older, just old.
People just don't want to die. Now I'm not afraid of death, I'm just afraid of getting there. Everybody has some trepidation about it, even me, but I'm resigned to the fact that it will happen. People think that if they can hold off the ageing process then perhaps they can fool father time into giving them a little more on the field to bat. I don't think he's fooled by some dyed hair and a plastic hip because once our innings is over it's over. Once the umpire has raised his finger we head off into the great pavillion in the sky, but the game goes on and in all of our yesterdays it's not whether how many runs we made, or whether we played at andmissed the ball more than we hit it, it's how we played the game.
| 25 |
| Vote |
Subscribe to this blog
