The other day I came across the TIME Magazine issue of 16th August where a middle aged man is look bewilderedly at what I assume to be his reflection in the mirror. As he looks at his slightly sagging middle, greying hair and still fairly athletic legs, one can imagine his dismay as he realises that he no longer looks what he did as a teenager or a young adult.
And he is not the only one – all of us are in pursuit of youth and will do anything to delay its onset. We try green tea and ginseng, we try anti oxidants and hormone replacement therapies. We try face lifts and botox and even go to the extent of having cosmetic surgery to keep those muscles from sagging and the hair from thinning. We go to health spas and detox, we exercise like maniacs and minutely watch every calorie that slips past our lips. We use anti wrinkle creams to smoothen those facial lines, colour our hair to cover the grey.  We do Yoga and Meditation and keep stress away so that we sleep well and look – younger than we actually are. We even try and dress young so that we don’t look our age.

Sadly though what we fail to acknowledge is that old age will come to us all whether we like it or not. Just as surely as the sun will rise in the East.

So why are we hankering after this elusive goal?

After all old age is not without its benefits –

You get 0.05% more Interest from retail banks on your Fixed deposits
You get concessional fares while travelling on buses, trains and planes
You can get pretty young things to read out labels which you can’t read despite your magnifying lenses
You can get handsome young hunks to help put your bags in the overhead bins
You can cut through queues simply because you are too tired to stand
And you can ask everyone to shut up and stop making a noise because you are old
You can expect people to humour you just because you’re grey
Contrarily you can do just as you please because you’re like a child after all.

But , we still want to be young for a few years more.
Whatever for?

The answer flashed through my mind early this morning
when I tried to get out of bed
and found that my back was sore,
my fingers were stiff and I couldn’t see a thing
without my spectacles.
I couldn’t even find them  anywhere near my bed
because I couldn’t remember when I’d last worn them and
where I’d last kept them.
‘Tis moments like this when the bones creak and moan,
when eyesight just fails you as lapses of memory –
that name of your best friend at the tip of your tongue
that stubbornly sticks there when you try to recall.

So do you really want to be younger and live through it all?
The anxiety of growing and not really knowing
How your future will be?

I doubt that’s we want,
We, Golden Oldies

What we really want from our youth is our
Energy and vim
Those eyes that can see and muscles that can lift
The strength of our youth with the wisdom of age
That’s what we want when we
Want to stay young.

This is the 8th Post in the Write Tribe September Challenge