Last night a young friend (almost 27) said to me, “I am an old soul.” Those words got me thinking. Not about the soul — God help me from ever going near that subject again — but about the mind and the body, and the aging of each.
The story of the aging body is old news (see “Old News: An Informal Study,” Oct. 5, 2023). My body — my good old buddy — and I have been closely associated going on 80 years now. We have had our ups and downs together, but it has mainly been a good ride.
A retrospective road map of our journey begins with a very fat baby, morphing into a toddler not very good at toddling, to a skinny kid who weighed 44 pounds in the first grade, to an awkward teenager who abruptly stopped growing, to the young man, 40 pounds ago, who arrived in Provincetown in 1968. And now what? My friends are getting older; the face in the mirror tells me I am, too. But has the real me — which I associate with my mind — changed?
There are shelves full of books on the mind-body interface, and it is safe to say that it is still a great mystery. Questions abound. Does the mind age at the same pace as the body? Must it age at all? Are changes in the mind simply attitudinal? Are they the effect of years lived, like water on stone, or are they intrinsic, the fraying of the cord from within? Certainly, the current plague of dementia represents an extreme (but all too common) example of generally age-related changes of the mind. But outside that tragic condition, does age have to bring changes in the brain? Can mind and body remain in sync for all our lives?
I talked to another friend, 88 years old, who described his mind as “attached to a dying animal.” I suppose that applies to all of us. Sebastian Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying (2024), deals with the mind at the time of death and perhaps after it — the near-death experience.
Certainly, having more of life behind you than you can realistically expect in the future must have some effect. It is not simply “living in the past” but the fact that we live and react to events based on reference points. Younger people are forming new references every day, while the older we get the more we rely on those we formed years ago. The present can be disconcerting, too, with all the changes occurring so fast — too fast. Traveling an old, familiar road is reassuring. On a recent sweltering day, a friend and I got temporarily lost in the dunes, a maze of bogs and copses. It was downright irritating. And the future, hurtling toward us, is so frightening, even as we have less personal investment in it. Listen to how many people in town yearn for the good old days and complain that “things ain’t what they used to was,” to quote the late Napi Van Dereck.
Another friend, only in her 40s, thought that her mind was “mellowing” with age. Can what seem to be changes in the mind simply be a difference in energy levels? The machine slows down.
And the memory lapses? The search for words? The desperate attempts to put names to faces we know we should recognize? Undeniable. But then there is more to remember, more people in our older mental Rolodexes. Still, my friend Sal, 96, has the world’s largest mental Rolodex, replete with the entire Portuguese genealogy of Provincetown and its fishing fleet and the names of the greatest artists, writers, and historians of the ages — and yet has remarkable access to it all.
So, although there are genetic and physical influences, the mind ages as we allow it to. In my dreams it seems I am neither old nor young, no particular age at all: I am just myself, my true, ageless self.
