Blog 297 – 05.18.2016

Today’s title was the slogan of Clairol Hair products in the late nineteen-sixties. I was a young man back then and used to tease my mother, who like a lot of people had a great fear of growing old, that she was not getting older but getting better. That does not just happen. We have to change our thinking to improve or to get better. Wisdom, patience, and understanding do not just come with age and even experience is not a teacher unless we learn from our mistakes and discard beliefs that are no longer serving us.

I think one of the saddest things is to see older people who are bitter and who see change as a threat as they live looking back to a yesterday that never really was. The good old days are a nostalgic construct. There is only now, today, in which to live, enjoy, and be happy. Youth like age is really just a state of mind. Frank Sinatra sang in the early nineteen-fifties, “Fairy tales can come true. It can happen to you if you’re young at heart.” Youth sees possibilities. If older people are not careful to maintain a grateful and expectant state of mind they can become so skeptical, negative, resentful, and soured on life that they think everything proves the wrong assumption that the world going to hell in a hand basket. All the “end times doom predictors” are of this ilk. Every change seems to be an indication of things getting worse and worse.

If that is the world you choose to live in be careful because it can become so fearful and depressing that you might end up taking your own life. My sweet mother did. She put a thirty eight in her mouth and blew her brains out. That was her choice, but long before that she stopped walking on the bright side of her life and allowed the cares of this life to still the young and hopeful girl’s heart that had once lived within her. And many more people kill themselves slowly with alcohol, drugs, and many other harmful distractions that numb the pain that life has become for them.

We are a society that does not understand the purpose of pain. Pain is a clear signal that something is wrong, that something needs to be changed and most often that is our thinking, our words, and or our actions. These three in descending order create the world we perceive around us. If we try to cover that pain with drugs or distractions the underlying root cause of our pain does not go away but in addition to that now we have habits, addictions, which lead to a lot more incorrect thinking,  words, and actions that hurt not only us but those that love us and those around us.

I don’t even like to say the words “getting older.” I prefer to say “getting younger.” Who knows how long anyone has been around anyway? Some of us may have cycled through countless lives already. There is a cute little expression people use sometimes to refer to the time before you were born. They say, “Before you were a twinkle in your father’s eye or a thought in his mind.” Was there ever a time that you and I were not a thought in our Father’s mind? It is something to think about. If we are eternal beings what difference does a few years make one way or another?

Remember your are not getting older just getting better.

Your friend and fellow traveler,
David White