Aging Gracefully
I have never felt that I was getting older or that I was coming upon middle age, until recently. The other afternoon I was driving with my daughter (who is now 6) when we learned the news of Michael Jackson's passing. My daughter asked, "Mom, who is that?" Clearly, I had not brought her up to speed on the King of Pop. So I explained who he was and we bobbed our heads for the entire one-hour ride home to songs like: Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Thriller, Billie Jean, Bad and Beat It. And while she innocently rocked out in the back seat, I got a little nostalgic about the last three plus decades of my life, the music that was the soundtrack to me and the shy kid (who wouldn't dance) that I was when Thriller topped the charts. As all kids should be, I was naïve and knew nothing of the world, business, the big picture or bull and bear markets—nor did I care.To further my fall into the abyss of age, the next day I came upon an article by columnist Lisa Kogan, titled: "40-Something Manifesto." While I am not quite 40 yet, (really I'm not) I could certainly relate to the whirlwind of life that she described. She wrote, "Many of us have demanding kids or aging parents or a little of each. We juggle jobs, mortgages, student loans, and cancer treatments with low-fat diets, low-impact aerobics, low-grade depressions, a strong sense of irony, a dark sense of humor and a full-bodied cabernet. We are tired. We are very tired." I related so much that I posted the article on my facebook page, e-mailed it to friends and made family suffer through readings of it. But at the end of it, Kogan came to the same conclusions as I did, she is a stronger, smarter and more confident Lisa Kogan than she was at 20.
- People:
- Nichole Stella