Eeyore is an old gray donkey. Old is an essential part of the picture. There is, of course, no real evidence that Eeyore was actually born (or stitched together) long before any of the other animals in the forest. But whereas Pooh and Piglet radiate youth, doubtless because of their unconscious adherence to the life force of Tao, Eeyore just seems old. Pessimists are precocious agers. I was old at 22 — ancient by 30. I have the unique, if dubious, honor of violating all the laws of biology by being older than my mother.
The signs of aging are well documented. Getting almost to the end of a book before you remember that you have read it before. Not being able to find your hair brush, or your hair. The creaks and groans and moans. Having to sit for a minute to gather your strength before getting out of the car. Hobbit hair on your ears. Crawling up the stairs on your hands and knees after a late night conversation in the family room. Wanting to throw teenagers into the heavy duty cycle of an industrial washing machine. Starting to see those grand conspiracies everywhere that you laughed at your parents for. Wanting to dump a bucket of water on a young girl for minor grammatical errors like replacing “said” with “goes”, as in “…and then she goes ‘Well, like duh…'”.
Some signs of aging are more subtle. Like when every mall, every housing development, every suburb starts to seem the same. When not just car parts but people seem interchangeable. When you can’t tell television programs or movies or popular songs apart anymore. When you would rather watch the fireworks from the hot tub than face the traffic and the crowds, even though there is a hill in the way and you can’t really see anything. Especially because there is a hill in the way and you can’t see anything. When you are more than willing to trade the exotic German car you had lusted after in your youth for the hot tub so that you have a comfortable place to not watch the fireworks. When a good night’s sleep becomes more important than fame and a quiet walk on the beach is better than fortune. When scrambled eggs sounds like a wonderful dinner. When talk show hosts seem to have the wit and sophistication of high school freshmen. And your youngest child is six foot two. When, to your horror, you finally realize that “Grandpa” means you.
Of course, everyone ages eventually. Some more than others. Pessimist, however, believe that old age should not be wasted on the old. So we skip quickly over all the bother and sweat and struggle of being young and jump directly to old age as soon as possible. Perhaps it’s the inevitability of it. Maybe we have warped psyches. Maybe we are just lazy. I was crushed when my 11th grade English teacher discovered my secret. She had put “See me” on the paper. I thought it was a pretty good paper, so I went up expecting some sort of compliment. After all, I was the only person in the class who had ever heard of James Thurber, let alone read most of his works. The rest of the class were really impressed, especially that I had actually read a book that I didn’t have to read. So I went up to her after class like an expectant puppy all but wagging my tail. “You lazy little wart!”, she said in a disgusted tone. And my world came crashing down. How did she know? I thought I had hidden it so well. I got quite a bit older that day.
I have spent many long hours trying to figure out why pessimists age prematurely. It is not so much that I really mind being old, it is just that it doesn’t seem quite fair to my wife and kids. Being married to an old man can’t be very fun and having one as a father is, according to my kids, a real bummer. They try to make the best of the situation. When I asked for Gregorian chants for Father’s Day, my youngest son went to every game store in town to try to find this new game called Gregorian Chance. It is just hard to relate when your father is separated by so much more than a single generation.
I figure it must start out by being exposed to the wrong sorts of things at an early age. There are certain influences that must be “ageogenic”. As I look back at my early life, I suspect that the Swingle Singers, Henry David Thoreau, and above all the Russian novelists had a strong influence on my premature aging. A solid diet of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky can put a real damper on the exuberance of being sixteen. The Russians have honed pessimism to a fine art. I studied at the feet of the real masters of pessimism. Carrying around the burdens of Mother Russia, even in overblown sophomoric delusions of profoundness, can age you in a hurry. And make you a rather strange child.
Being slow also makes you age prematurely. Cause and effect are somewhat tangled here. It is not clear whether you seem older because you are slow or get slower because you are old. In any case, it is hard to imagine Eeyore at full gallop. Plodding along is more his style. I ran the hundred yard dash in sixteen seconds in high school. The fast kids were under ten seconds. Sixteen seconds wouldn’t win the Grandmothers Only race at the church picnic. So I figured I would run distances instead. But I was too good in math. It did not take me long to figure out that an 880 yard run at a 16 second per hundred pace was not competitive even at the suburban high school level. I would be barely competitive at the mile if I ran full speed the whole way. When you run like an old man at seventeen it is hard not to think of yourself as an old man. So I decided to leave it to the Tigger types to go racing around. And I went back to my bog to munch thistles and read dusty old books on the history of the cathedrals of the middle ages by obscure 19th century pessimists. Not only strange, but slow.
I was what is sometimes called a late bloomer. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always wait around until you have bloomed, especially if you are a Mormon. I was just getting a grip on puberty when they sent me off to Germany for two years on a mission. Six months after I got home, I was married. My youth wasn’t so much mis-spent as just missed. Of course, most of this was my own fault. And I have never for a second regretted the marriage. It is by far the best decision I ever made. Nothing else even comes close. But it did drop me into the whole business of paying the rent and buying detergent at a tender age. And a year later I was changing diapers. Unless you are careful, having a family can age you prematurely. And I wasn’t careful.
There are times when even a pessimist has to put all this aside and come out of the bog and play with the kids. When it comes time to be a father, you have to put away the pessimism, put on a party face, and join in the fun. That I didn’t do that more often is a regret that I will never out live. Instead I worried and fretted and got a lot older very quickly. Being a weird kid may be OK, but being a weird father is not fair to your children. It certainly wasn’t fair to mine.
Nothing makes you age as quickly as getting behind. By 25 I was years behind where I had intended to be when it came to my schooling and career. And like Alice’s rabbit, the faster I went the behinder I got. This was just silliness of course. At least looking back on it. But at the time it was easy to get depressed that I hadn’t made it through graduate school yet. Of course it would have helped if I had gone to class a little more often. Since my job was 2500 miles from the campus, I tended to miss quite a few classes. My abortive attempt at an academic career was just as bad, except that it was much harder to skip class. When I finally did get my degree and got an academic position I lost both my freedom and most of my income (my part time job during graduate school was rather unusual). Further and further behind. Older and older.
However, there are a few bright spots in this rather somber tale. At times I have managed to slow down, if not entirely reverse, this process of premature aging. I have done it a couple of times by running. Nothing competitive mind you. I am still as slow as ever. But at some point you can impress people, and more importantly impress yourself, not by how fast you run but by how far you run. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes.
I started running with some of the guys from work. I was in my early thirties at the time and running was all the rage. We ran up the canyon near work. About 3 miles. After a while, I felt like I could run a little further and so I started running about 6 miles. One afternoon as I was finishing my 6 miles, I suddenly thought to myself, “I could run a lot further.” So I decided to run a marathon and started training. I over-trained and trained far too close to the race, so I developed knee problems within the first few miles. But I kept going. By the time I got down into town, people started wincing when they looked at me and offering me Band-Aids. I thought they figured I had blisters, so I politely turned them down saying that I was running weird because of my knees. When I got to the finish line a heavy set military looking nurse ripped off my shirt and came at me with Vaseline. It was then I realized why people had been offering me Band-Aids. I was used to running without a shirt, but had put on a shirt for the race since we started in the mountain chill and so I would have a place for my number. It’s called jogger’s nipple. I looked like I had been shot twice in the chest. The blood was dripping down to my waist. But the jogger’s nipples didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t step over a curb for several days. All that mattered was that I had finished. I didn’t get much older that year.
I have had other minor victories with premature aging. Another marathon, without knee problems this time and without a shirt. A triathlon. A bike race up a steep mountain canyon to a ski area. Riding some young turk into the ground at our noon time trek up the mountain at work. Being congratulated by the Governor for successfully negotiating the worst rapid on the river with a nifty spin at just the right moment (he just happened to be on the same river at the time). All these helped slow the aging.
But it wasn’t just endurance sports that helped. I found that any success, at work, at home, or with the family helped me to feel not quite so old. I eventually discovered that one thing that makes us old is not participating fully in life. It is sitting in the park and watching rather than being a part of the action. As pessimists, we tend to go off in our corner. The problem is that it is too easy to just watch from the corner. And just watching makes you old very quickly.
As pessimists we may live in the bog, away from the crowds and the fast lane, but we should still live, not just observe. Eeyore was an active part of much of what went on in the forest. He was a participant, if somewhat bumbling, not just a spectator. Leading a quiet life is very different than leading an inactive life. It is the activity that helps keep us young. Of course, nothing works like success. But even failure is better than non-participation.
Pessimism tends to turns sour when we withdraw from life. When we hide away and watch life on TV or read about it in books or watch the little dramas play out at the office. Being a pessimist means choosing what parts of life to get involved with very carefully. Choosing them based on our own appraisal of their worth and value rather than their popularity with the crowd. But it will not do to withdraw entirely. The goal of pessimism is a quiet life, not a quiet death. If you find yourself getting old prematurely, it is probably because you have abandoned life and are just waiting to die.
But once you turn 40, it’s all over and you might as well give up.
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