Aging: Sudden or Gradual?

Someone told me that we’re dying from the moment we’re born. I understand what they’re saying, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. If you tell me though that we’re getting older, even aging, from day one, that I can accept.

I began to see the first signs of aging when I was in my twenties. I couldn’t drink the way I used to. I went to a tiny college in Minnesota where alcohol was still the only drug. We all drank. By clinical standards – I learned this soon after in social work school – we all had drinking problems. Everyone I knew had blacked out from drinking. More than once. It was part of surviving Minnesota winters. But by my mid- twenties, I couldn’t drink that way anymore.

By thirty, I began to need more sleep. I couldn’t “pull all-nighters” anymore and still function the next day. But I still had many years of staying-up-late/sleeping-late before I realized that I couldn’t do that either: hours of sleep missed before midnight could no longer be made up in the morning.

I noticed that I couldn’t do things on the basketball court that I’d done the last time I played. My mind maneuvered but my body didn’t follow. Still, it would be years before I found myself carefully holding the banister going up or down steps.

Maybe, it was the doctors who made me so much more conscious of aging. When did they start asking me if I’d fallen since my last visit? When did I start answering, “Yes.” When did it occur to me that falling wasn’t such a good idea, that I ought to start to pay attention? Was it after the disc collapse in 2008? Was it after the carotid artery roto-rooter in 2018? Certainly, it was then that I started paying attention to how many steps I was taking each day. It seemed sensible, Newtonian: A body in motion remains in motion.

Just in the last year or so, it’s become important to keep doing chores: doing the laundry – carrying the loads up and down the stairs to the basement; putting the garbage out; doing the food shopping; to keep doing as much as I can for as long as I can. And, at the same time, being reasonable: no shoveling snow, Ken, no matter how fit you think you are. That’s a ticket for an instant heart attack.

I’ve been aging gradually and I’ve been noticing the changes now for more than fifty years, a slow gradual process, nothing sudden really. Yes, there were months after the disc collapse when I couldn’t sit cross-legged on the floor. Now I can do that again.Tthere were months after the angioplasty complications when I couldn’t lift anything heavier than a half-gallon of milk. But that restriction is now lifted, and I am back to doing some resistance training – lower weights, higher reps.

But nI wonder, is there “sudden” aging in my future? There are Zen people who make quite a deal about the difference between “sudden” and “gradual.” Is sudden enlightenment better than gradual enlightenment? And there are other Zennies who see in all our comparisons – fast, slow; new car, old car; tall, short; rich, poor; gradual, sudden – the source of much of our suffering.

Why worry about gradual and sudden? I’m doing okay with gradual aging, have been for a long time. How will I handle sudden aging? Don’t know.