I am a big believer in the truism that’ He who is not busy being born is busy dying.” That’s why I am still working at seventy-six, absorb as much news as I can stomach, carve, and have multiple hobbies.
As a younger man, I saw my older friends do it in their style: the eighty-year-old Polish lady who was my stand-in babchi ( grandmother) was working on charitable causes full time and the friend who at eighty-plus was busy restoring a 1929 Rolls.
Admittedly my friends had the physical and mental capability to keep going as they did. But I’ve known other less able who still go about their interests in whatever fashion they can while limited in physical ability. For example, one disabled friend followed Massachusetts politics with savage glee. He maintained that politics was a sort of soap opera where an advance in one area by an individual or party was met with gnashing of the teeth, blood-curdling pronouncements, and potboiler sentiments.
I adhere to the school of thought that staying occupied helps shove a cork in our inevitable decline. Or as the comedian George Burns said: “You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old.”