Saturday 5 November 2011

Getting Older

Getting older, getting old.
As life rushes by, we wonder what it’s all about, we struggle to make sense of it all,
and we come to the end of our understanding; we are baffled by it all, in the end.

We are all whole universes; whole universes of trouble, whole universes of love,
whole universes of complexity; when we die a whole universe dies with us.

In the wee small hours we sit, and hope that life goes on forever. We watch our movies, drink our
beer, and think our thoughts, lost in space and time.

Those moments, when we are lost even to ourselves, when everything seems possible and nothing
seems impossible, are fleeting, but they are what keeps us going.

Feel like I’m living on borrowed time, all the time, feel like I’m living on borrowed time.

All the dreams I had when I was young; did they just disappear into the ether?

People move in and out of your life as you get older. New things appear, and old things go, go the
way of all things, to be forgotten, as we no doubt will be forgotten.

Who wants to get older, and give way to the younger? We all dream that we will live forever; but we
don’t.

So, we get old, and we can’t do a thing about it; we are on a long journey, and we will find ourselves
at the end of it. 

14 comments:

  1. Getting older is another one of G-d’s ways of refining us. The steel has been tempered and the metal is ready for the Makers hand.

    Isaiah 53:10 - Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

    Amazingly there are times (few moments) in life when one feels really good, happy, physically fit and at peace. This is when G-d sustains us.

    Nehemiah 9:21 - Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet swelled not.

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  2. Thankyou for that interesting and incisive comment; I didn't think anyone would comment on my poem, so there you go!

    God moves in mysterious ways His miracles to perform. We all get old, it's a fact of life; it's how we approach it that makes all the difference.

    The OT is such an inspiration in many ways; what God told those old-time prophets still rings true today.

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  3. Wow! Like this a lot... made me think a lot about the difference between the phrases - getting older and getting old... I realise I'm happier to say getting older, than getting old...

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  4. Hi Dave; thanks for the comment, it's much appreciated!

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  5. This is so poetic Tim. =) I love reading it.
    And thanks for sharing your thoughts & feelings on aging. I thought it was just me who is feeling the pangs. I guess all people go through it but the big difference would be on who is with us on the journey. I've heard somewhere that says: since we can't escape aging nor dying, we just have to accept it with God's grace. That way it makes it lighter to bear & we just might come to the joy of realizing what the Bible says that it's actually gain to be gone from this world. God bless!

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  6. Hi Mara; thanks for the lovely comment! I guess I felt a little melancholy and reflective when I wrote it. I have no illusions about being a great poet, I just wanted to put down my feelings about the subject of aging.

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  8. Joan said...
    Hi Tim, I look in the mirror and see a woman of sixty-six years of age looking back at me. I don't know who she is, I don't feel the way she looks. In my mind I am thirty years of age and think that I look thirty years of age. When I smile she smiles. I don't ever look at her without smiling, it would be too painful, I think. When I see candid, unsmiling photographs of myself I see what others see and wonder why people don't run in the other direction more quickly than they do!

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  9. Hi Joan, I really appreciate your thoughtful and poignant comment. All I can say is that your photograph looks very young, and you have aged very very well for someone who says she is sixty six! I suppose we all have a picture of the way we look in our heads, in other words we're always the age we imagine ourselves to be; I'm no spring chicken myself! But, you know, age is really just a number.

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  10. Ooops, I should have said, when setting up my blog I did not have a photo and so used one that was ten years old. Updating now, the kindest one available. I still have some pride!

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  11. You still look very young Joan, you really have nothing to worry about!

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  12. As someone who looks younger than he's any right to (drink, drugs, hard paper round), all I can add is that age does comforting things to us. We stop caring what people think of us, develop more confidence in ourselves and care less about the menopaunch etc...

    And Joan's pic, even with ten years added, is one of a cutie - sorry for any embarrassment caused.

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  13. Hi Daz; thanks for the comment. I noticed that you haven't been contributing to 'Rabbit lately; glad to see you're back.

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