Serious thoughts from an not so serious chair

Although I’m eighty-two, I still like to sit quietly in a comfy arm chair and consider some of the serious questions of life like, ‘Why am I still here at eighty-two?’ and ‘Why am I still where?’, or even, ‘Eighty-two what? It all gets to be a bit of a problem once you get past a certain age doesn’t it; every great idea seems to wander out of your head again, almost as soon as you think it. Thank goodness that by then you feel it really couldn’t have been important, then you can snuggle back even deeper into that comfy armchair to consider the next big problem.

The good – perhaps even the most important thing about getting old is the fact that problems seem comparatively unimportant up to the way they appeared thirty or forty years ago. For instance, in those far off days, dying seemed like something to avoid at all costs, but at my age, I know damned well that I shall only be around for a comparatively short length of time now, so I’ve adopted the attitude that I might as well enjoy what I still have. Even death itself has lost its ability to scare me; though I do hope it will be fairly painless; I’ve enjoyed a fantastic life, with the assistance of lovely Jacqui, my partner for fifty-eight of those eighty-two years. We’ve been lucky enough to remain fairly healthy, we’ve had three kids, all of whom have ten fingers, ten toes and brains that function, we’ve tried lots of fun things, some of which other people haven’t had the opportunities to do, like ballooning, gliding, world travel and weird foods. I have made a reasonable success of my life’s work, lucky that the profession I chose would amount to a pleasant hobby to many other people, while I was also able to make money at it!

So I really have no complaints, and I look on every day from now on as a bonus, a new toy, full of immense possibilities, fenced in by nothing more substantial than my own imagination, or lack of it! I wake in the morning, quickly check that I have a pulse, (you can’t be too careful!), and peer out through the curtains to see what kind of a day I’ve been granted. Rain or shine can present the first two distinct sets of possibilities for me to explore. Rain and my mind switches to ‘stay home and paint or read’ or ‘do some work on the computer’, closely followed by ‘or there’s the cinema’ and ‘drive into town and get in a bit of retail therapy! Sunshine brings on mental images of beaches, (something we have a glut of where we live), fishing and maybe even a bit of light gardening if the fancy takes me. All I have to do then is get permission from Jacqui, for her to let me take her wherever she wants to go. (Just kidding – we’re much more democratic than that!).

The important point I’m trying to make, of course, in a fairly light-hearted way is the necessity not to let your brain doze its remaining time away until you wake up one morning – dead, and with a mass of things you meant to do but never got round to it. Or worse still, if there is somewhere we all go when we pass on, you get there and can’t remember who you were when you were alive, or what you did and who with, all because your brain sank into dementia some years before when you should have been exercising it!

Oh, I know I’m vastly overstating the case, but nonetheless, the brain is the battery and the motor that makes everything else function, and if it’s left to fade in later years, it gets like any other engine that isn’t used – clogged up with rubbish and unable to work properly. Remember how much better your car works after a really brisk workout in the country when you have an opportunity to burn away accumulated crud inside the engine? Well, I believe it’s much the same with your brain, work it hard and remove the waste products, then it will keep functioning efficiently.

Now clear off and leave me to settle comfortably in my chair again!

Do you feel the same as Brian? Let us know in the comments down below.

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