Growing old gracefully

Sorry I haven't posted for a while. Class has kept me busy. I've been going to bed earlier and waking up later -- increasing my average sleep time considerably. In fact, I've gone from sleeping around 5 1/2 hours a night to almost 7 sleep hours and yet have never felt so tired! Figure THAT out...

My eyes keep drifting shut every time I have a spare moment. I mean, they say we collect a sleep debt -- that the only way to rid ourselves of it is to allow ourselves to wake up without an alarm and for a length of time: that eventually your body will realign itself to an 8-hour sleep cycle but only after you've made up for lost sleep time. So maybe it's just a case of my body grasping at the extra sleep time like a starving man at a cracker ... your body's fine not eating until it gets a morsel of food, and then your stomach gases churn.

Okay, enough with the analogies.

My thought for the day is this:

I saw my wife's Oprah magazine sitting out in the bathroom and I noticed how young and handsome Oprah still looks. I thought, "Well, she has aged gracefully." But then I couldn't help wondering how much money she's spent on plastic surgery. If I had her money, I suppose I'd do the same.

So then I started thinking about my previous thought. Does "growing old gracefully" mean that we remain attractive even into old age -- rather than falling apart once we pass middle age? Or is "growing old gracefully" actually an attitude: meaning that we accept the fact that we are aging? Because if it's the first, well, I guess Oprah appears to be growing old gracefully. But, if it's the second, then she's pathetically clinging to youth.

Personally, I've never been afraid of death. I have feared senility or the crippling effects of time. When I surpass middle age ... I hope that it's with resignation and resolution. The past is good for nostalgia, the future for planning. But we should live, content, in the time we're given. I'm not saying that we shouldn't use healthy living and medicine to prolong life or make it more worthwhile -- only that cosmetic surgery seems, to me, a lie.