How to age gracefully
Recently, an old man in the family died, and suddenly, when facing life and death up close, I had more insights. Life is so short, how do we live this life well? True to that sentence, no one knows, tomorrow and the accident which one comes first.
Especially the elderly in the family are getting older, and they are also going farther and farther on the road to old age, how to face "aging"? How to face life and death? This has become a question that I have been thinking about a lot lately.
The book "Growing Old Gracefully" is the work of Junichi Watanabe. For this author, it seems that when he was in college, reading the history of foreign literature, the familiar work is the series of "Paradise Lost", relatively speaking, the scale is still relatively large. When I saw him writing this book, I couldn't help but look at the understanding of "old" by this literary master, and see how he grew old gracefully.
He said a sentence, which I am more convinced: Once fifty passes, don't think about how to live wonderfully, but imagine how to die beautifully.
This sentence should be well known to the vast number of Chinese. Chinese parents have worked too hard all their lives, the first half of their lives for their children, the second half of their lives for their grandchildren, and their whole lives have been living for others by adhering to the "succession of generations", and they have never thought of how to live for themselves. I didn't even think about how to face death with dignity.
Of course, after reading this book, I feel a little idealistic, not everyone is like Junichi Watanabe, has a good economic condition, has a good mentality, perhaps this condition is more rooted in the cultural concepts of different countries!
His elegance must have a certain economic basis. It can be seen from the catalog that he hopes that when he is old, he will enjoy love more freely, wear a chinese dress, disregard the eyes of the world, be full of curiosity, and pursue the love of life. And most of the elderly in our country, especially the elderly in the countryside, at this age, either have limited mobility, sitting in the sun every day to bask in the sun "waiting for death"; or they can carry a hoe and live to the old age; or they are the "staff life" of picking up and dropping off their grandchildren to and from school at eight to five points... Which is a happy old age? Which is the so-called "elegance"? This actually has a lot to do with the economic foundation, because they don't want their children to get out of work, so they are dedicating themselves to their children's descendants in various forms, and strive to turn into spring mud and protect flowers after they have fallen off their branches, which is the greatness of our Chinese parents!
Of course, his "elegance" is not necessarily accepted by most people, after all, there must be a certain ideological basis. Reading Junichi's "Paradise Lost" should understand that his series of works are of the same genre, so in this "Elegant Aging", you can also see this consistent idea: even if you are old, you must love. He believes that love makes people young, and when they are old, they must pursue love. For this view, I do not comment, after all, love is a thing that does not distinguish between ages, every age has the charm of each age, and bystanders have no right to beak. Our country also has a lot of twilight love, but also a vigorous love, like Liang Shiqiu and Han Jingqing, all of them have written love poems for a long time, or are they not blushing? Being able to love once at the twilight of life is something that ordinary people can do.
So, there are limits to that as well.
It is good to age gracefully, but in fact, it is very good to be able to grow old with dignity. At the very least, when the limit is approaching, it is also a kind of decency not to let yourself suffer and not to drag others down.
The rest is to let yourself want to open up a little when you are old, so that you are not so depressed. I think that's a way to grow old.