Growing old is a process, but being old is a shock. Paul Simon was only in his mid-20s when he wrote the lyric “How terribly strange / To be 70,” but his hunch was accurate. You’re caught up in the normal current of life, the days drifting by just like they always have, and out of nowhere comes this “Wait, what?” moment, this hammer blow of reality notifying you that—actuarially if not actually—your life meter is now in the red zone.
Now that I’m 76, this unwelcome epiphany happens to me every few months, and it takes a moment to work through my initial reaction that a mistake has been made, that a decade or so has been misplaced, and to allow the truth to settle in: I’m a geezer. But it’s one thing to absorb that fact, it’s another to accept it. It’s too easy to feel ashamed of your decelerating body, as if aging was not an inevitable development but some sort of character flaw.