This series is based on a chapter in Napoleon Hill’s classic read “Think and Grow Rich” discussing basic human fears. I dub them the 7 Chakras of Fear and from the Fear of Death, now the Fear of Old Age.
“What is the worst of woes that wait on age? What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow? To view each loved one blotted from life’s page, And be alone on earth, as I am now.’” Lord Byron’s pen bled these words over a hundred and fifty years ago though he himself never grew old – he died at age 36. Still the poet was intimately in touch with the fear of growing old.
Old age represents a deep fear of loss. It laments the inevitable loss of a responsive body, a resilient mind, of economic and social freedoms, of friends and friendships, physical fertility and vitality, and loss of sexual desirability. The anxiety over fading looks and ebbing vigor are reason enough for multi billion-dollar industries to thrive. Little blue pills peddled to men, and for women the belief that beauty can be cosmetically preserved past nature’s due date.
In a society where youth and beauty are revered, the old are qualified by number, pushed from the spotlight and warehoused out of harm’s way. Ageism, which is abuse and neglect based on age, literally kills the elderly at a rate faster than reviled prejudices including racial violence, religious intolerance and homophobia.
Words of the elderly eerily foreshadow what is feared of growing old, “I’m terrified that one day I’m going to die and they’re not going to find me for a week”. Growing old alone is a terrifying universal fear, but so too is feeling the weight of being a burden to children or family as health fails or dementia consumes the mind.
The thought of losing the faculty that links endearing memories of family, friends, even of the love of a lifetime, evoke core primal fears. Disconcerting also, living with paranoia that loved ones are circling, gathering for the spoils. Age is a cruel turn from independence to utter dependence – of becoming a child again, but cursed with the stubborn insecurities of an adult.
Even if a number is not your personal demon, the tacit, or at times overt judgments that qualify and disqualify an individual’s contribution, or value, to society based solely on a number is pressure enough to lie about that number, or to encourage extreme remedies that blur the lines with surgery. But looks can be deceiving. Either by genetics or by conscious self-preservation, I don’t look the number that is my age. I do not behave like that number, and I don’t think parallel to the number assigned me, yet the number has cost me someone’s love and limits economic opportunities under control of those who judge by number.
My fear of aging is this: at times I feel born to resolve a Rubik Cube puzzle not knowing the amount of sand in my hourglass. I observe the driven and gifted succeed swiftly as if mentored by greater forces. I also witness the ignorant remain blissfully unaware of all things but the ravages of time. Me, I feel the struggle to gain traction and to become relevant. My fear is that growing old is a slow realization, but being old is a sudden reckoning, and the moment of crossing the Rubicon isn’t a marker or a boundary, but merely a state of mind.
To reach a golden age portends of having earned a measure of power, wealth or influence that supplant youth. Yet these worldly graces remain tenuous and subject to paranoia and fear of loss. Undervalued is the golden gift of age. A gift that can’t be bought, gifted, stolen, borrowed or perjured. It can only be gained – yet not guaranteed – with growing old; it’s a gift fear can’t tarnish: the gift of wisdom.
Gerontophobia – ever heard the word? I never knew it existed. Gerontophobia is a fear of elderly people. Seriously! Now we’re heading into Monty Python territory, but I date myself.
