Plain dress November - growing old in the Plain way

Sometimes I feel really old now.  I am 53.  Whatever I feel like, unless I die prematurely, I have a lot of growing older to do.  The journey to death is similar to the journey to birth.  The young woman in labour for the first time thinks this feels pretty tough, she must be nearly there now; the midwife looking on sees her composure and knows she ain't seen nothing yet.  I guess it's the same with growing old.  But already I am shocked by the extent of the range of things that hurt, and that I look like an old witch, and the extra weight I carry, and that I can't lift the heavy things I used to shift with no bother, and that somedays the skin on my face feels too big.

Old age confers some things - it is kindly said to bring wisdom, but for sure it doesn't guarantee it.  It seems to bring a certain confidence - the old people I've known become less anxious than when they were younger; care less about the impression they make and what other people think of them, find it easier to speak up about their preferences and opinions.

Apart from that, old age seems to be a steady process of stripping away - strength, beauty, speed, discretion, teeth, hair, continence, health, esteem.

Eventually almost everything goes.

I remember an old man I knew, who had various memories and concerns he liked to share: the weather, his responsibility taking up the offering at evening worship, his painful feet, his memories of his evil wife who had left him, and his time in Burma during the war when two special things had happened - he had come face to face with a tiger cub, and he had met a beautiful actress who had come to entertain the troops and sing to them.  She had, he thought, taken quite a shine to him.  She had spoken to him, and he felt proud of, and encouraged by, the attention she showed him.  A fleeting encounter, but treasured for about 45 years.
Time went by, and his health waned further.  He went to live in a care facility, where I used to go to visit him.  Bit by bit he forgot almost everything, until only two things remained - the tiger and the actress.  He told me about them every time I went to see him.  And then he died.

It seems to me that what life leaves us holding (after everything else has one thing after another been taken away) is our habits.  As the brain ages and synapses open in its structure, we lose our capacity to discern and filter out what is best left unsaid, and we start simply to say what we think.  Habits of thinking kindly and gratefully and humbly will stand me in good stead once the day comes that I start talking through the gaps in my brain.  Habits of mind, habits of life and of speech - little by little everything else will leave me, but these will remain.

I'm not sure: it may be that at 53 it is already too late to learn; perhaps I am already too set in my ways.  But I'd like to try, in the time that lies ahead, to lay down Plain habits of speech and mind and life: humility, kindness, honesty, quietness, faith, gratitude, simplicity.  Then, whatever else I may lose - my eyesight, my hearing, control of bladder and bowel, bone and muscle strength, vascular functioning, whatever -  I will be left with those beautiful treasures to share and show.