Middle age conundrum: The wisdom and the agony of advancing years

Being old is no fun. Till about 40, you’re fine physically. After that you go downhill and don’t realise how steep the hill is. I’m 50 and let me tell you, it’s pretty steep. I’m not sure what is meant by middle age. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a polite way of saying old, but probably not near immediate death. Life expectancy till very recent times, meaning the beginning of the last century, was 45 or so. 

Most people married and procreated a few years after puberty, so there was a good chance you could be a grandparent by your late 30s. You then had maybe four or five years for your child to harass you with their child and then you were off to say hello to your maker. Or, if you were Hindu, padding up for your next innings. 

My guess is that the phrase middle age probably came into use sometime in the 20th century and probably in post-war America. The etymological dictionary says it is “the period between youth and old age, formerly generally understood as 40 to 50, late 14c., from middle (adj.) + age (n.). The adjective middle-aged ‘having lived to the middle of the ordinary human lifespan, neither old nor young’ is by c. 1600.”

However, it doesn’t cite any sources, so I doubt it was of common currency even if it was used. The very idea of middle age is a modern thing. A person nearing the end of their career, about to collect the monogrammed watch and be sent off by the company. Its problems — a couple’s anxiety over their savings or their daughter’s education or their son’s marriage, a man’s midlife crisis — are all modern.
 

There’s no midlife crisis in the Mahabharata and it pretty much features a laundry list of all of man’s and woman’s crises. Hanging around till 80 with nothing to do for the last quarter century of your life is not something you will read about in the 19th century or any time before that. 

 

The big problem, and the one I am whining about today, is health. You get injured more easily and you heal slower. And by slow I mean slow. The double whammy is that as you’re older, you’re obliged to do more to stay fitter and that means exercise, which means the possibility of injury. 

I have been laid up for the last month with a bum knee. I don’t even know how I hurt it. I finished the yoga class four weeks ago or so and got up from my cross-legged position and began to limp with a swollen knee. I spent three days hobbling around hoping the thing would heal itself but that was a textbook example of what you would call the triumph of hope over experience, except that it wasn’t really a triumph. Such a thing would not have happened in my 20s and if it had, would have gone away after a night’s sleep. 

This thing stayed exactly the same for a week till I accepted defeat and called the doctor. It has taken three weeks of physiotherapy, meaning a total of about 10 hours of heat pads, gel treatment, wax casts and leg lifting exercises for the swelling to go and for the knee to be good enough for me to do 10 uncomfortable squats. 

I have not been able to cycle this time, have put on weight as a result, and generally have been immobile. That is what age is. The body doesn’t know how to heal itself because you weren’t supposed to be here in the first place. 

It never occurred to me to buy travel insurance when going abroad in all the decades that I did. Some nations may have made it a visa requirement, and the travel agent may have taken care of it, but I had not taken interest in this. But for the last couple of years I have been myself looking at policies and what they cover, and paying extra for the more elaborate covers because the possibility of injury and being in hospital is not insignificant. 

Pretty soon, though that time has not yet come, I will have to plan where to go and at what time of the year and to what sort of terrain, based on how difficult it might be, rather than just jump onto the plane and figure out what to do on landing. 

Some foreigners, Europeans and Africans especially, might wonder if this is not exaggeration, but they are not familiar with Indian bodies. I read the phrase “soft Indian bodies” only a few days ago, though I cannot remember where, and it is quite accurate. Physically, we’re not as hardy as the rest and the body breaks down easier.

The age of retirement is 66 in France and 67 in Italy and Japan raised it to 70 this year. One reason why the UK has about twice the number of Covid-positive patients as India but six times the number of deaths is that it has people who live till they are older. 

In the last three years alone, I have broken my foot while bowling (that put me out of commission for three months), had surgery for damage sustained while lifting weights, had my back treated twice, and these are only the ones I can remember. There is more pain ahead I assure you, and more to the point, I assure myself.

What is to be done except whine about it and share it with you, who may already be going through it or are about to? One reason the old seem to talk so much to each other is possibly that they have discovered these secrets that the rest of us are oblivious to. I must make my way to them, limping along, and see what they can teach me.

A thing I have learned for certain is that “looking forward to retirement” is the most fraudulent phrase in the English language.