The Aging Mind
What follows is based on several general statements: The only thing constant in life is Change---The only thing eternal is Time---The basis for Change is Diversity. Failure to appreciate the role of Diversity as the engine for progress leads to a life of endless discontentment---a Don Quiote attacking windmills.
We will not be the same person tomorrow as we are today. We are not the same person today as we were yesterday or many yesterdays. We all change. The person we love when we marry is not going to be the same person years down the road and neither will we. The change can bring a couple closer together or drive them further apart. That's the way it is, and has been, for this process called life.
Over time we have varied experiences imposed on an inherited genetic make-up. We argue about when our life really began or precisely ends, but these questions are inane. In reality, once life really began it never really ended. The living cells just begeted more living cells and life proceeded. We were once an embryo, before that a fertilized egg, and before that a living sperm and egg cell, and they came from living cells too. So we have an extraordinary long history---we all do. Of course most of our past we just can't remember, like when we were a fertilized egg or a separate egg and sperm, or an embryo. We really can't write any book on what our life was like as an embryo, but yes that was us way back then too.
We can talk about the sanctity of life, and in the broadest sense we are right to sanctify life. We cannot imagine anything coming from nothing, but it must have, or there was never any nothing, but that too is unimaginable. Some matters are simply beyond human comprehension, at least so far. Well, some might protest, sanctity of life applies to individuals. Really? So which individuals of any species on our planet never die? Which of us will not die? Of course we will die and that means the process of life, to which most of us would attribute such a process as one created by God, is a process that has no sanctity of individual lives. We might say death is a consequence of birth with but temporary reprieves. We all die in the long run. Some egg/sperm combinations will never exist, and of those that do, some never live much of a life, some live a good life, and some live a 'good' life with little contentment, and others live a simple life with a lot of contentment. Whatever life is, diversity prevails. And from the diversity comes advancement of this evolutionary process.
Very well then, at least we exist for a 'little gleam of Time between two eternities'.
Still, we keep changing, this person called "I", over time. If there is a Heaven just which "I" at what age is going to exist in Heaven? If a child dies and goes to heaven does this child have the mind of child forever in heaven? The rest of us matured, if I can use the term loosely, because of all our experiences in life. A child who dies missed all that, so how can his/her mind mature? Ok, this is not about Heaven so I will stop here with these puzzling questions.
Certain moments in life we all remember. I remember sitting on a hillside as a child with my best friend Buff, the dog. I asked Buff, "what is life all about?". I don't think Buff burdened himself with any such question. To him life was simple----eat, play, sleep. He didn't inherit any religion, he knew nothing about death, competition, justice, heathens, etc. Myself and a boyhood friend in the neighborhood let Buff be Buff and all that gained was a ticket for Buff to some farm where he could not 'bother' other people for miles around. That may well have been my first encounter with a helplessness to protect someone else. If we live long enough we suffer through such losses over and over. We die a thousand cuts and losses in the process, death by a thousand cuts.
From the start we ask, "what can we know, how can we know it, and what good will it do to know it"? Remember, we are all dead in the long run. Life has more questions than answers, and we just do the best we can, bumbling along, too often too ignorant of the process which controls life.
Our minds age, of course they do, but it is always an individualized process. Like with so much else, apparently there is no best way to age, no typical way to age, no precise time scale on aging. With time our priorities change, and thus our mental state also.
It takes the human mind in the formative stage well more than a decade to cope minimally with reality. It is a long process, an exhausting, confusing, upsetting, challenging, fearful, exciting, competitive time in which our emotional state is often front and center. Some are given adequate support and protection during these years, others are not. We could do much, much better for all youth, but we tend, in varying degrees, to sort of adopt some sort of 'family values' and decide only our own kids require our focus, even though many of us go to church and pretend otherwise. That's sad from a religious standpoint, and disastrous for those young in desperate need of adequate support and protection---you know, the rest of 'God's children'. I wonder if this irritates or disappoints God, that we favor our own and ignore the rest of His children? And who are the rest of His children? Just humans? The same process created all life in all forms. Maybe logic dictates that the natural resources are his children too. Figuring out God, or even defining God, is an illusionary, above our pay grade, exercise.
After our formative years we focus a lot on love, social relationships, careers, sex, competition, money, and try to pile quality things higher and higher. Soon, where once a warm blanket and food was enough to make us happy, enough becomes never enough as our personal trap. Addiction to anything never leads to contentment, it just takes more to get a high which is then followed by a lower low. Addictions to anything are not a good thing for the mind.
If we make it through our productive years with reasonable health, then our mind starts to ponder broader questions about life and we may begin to see the forest for the sake of the trees. In later years we either become more independent or more dependent. Unfortunately, the more we are dependent on others to bring us some contentment, the more likely we are to be more and more discontented. Another trap. We need learn to amuse ourselves more.
From early years on we see a lot of things. But we see many things as we want to see them, and learn things the way we want to learn them. We understand the concept of fairness but we too often see things as 'us' vs 'them. That's uncivilized, a characteristic seen in lower animals on the ladder of life. We shrug off our own failures with the Golden Rule, pray to God to make things right for more people when we ourselves, collectively, have the ability to do that. Sometimes we actually do---individually or collectively. But this 'sometimes' leaves a lot of humans left unattended and unprotected from harm and disaster. Well, we say, it is not our fault, that God operates in mysterious ways. It seems strange to blame bad things on God. We may, some of us, begin to understand that we are not dealing with Good vs Evil here, or any Heaven vs Hell, but a process which depends on chance, environment and survival of the fittest. Not fittest as simply strength or intelligence, but which ever path leads to an improved and expanded species population of our planet.
We try so hard early on for so long to be someone 'special', to invent a God who will protect us from life's land mines. Slowly, over time, if we live long enough, we may actually realize that we are not individually special, or have earned many of the good things that come our way, that ethics is really duty to the Golden Rule, and that we cannot reach a high level of contentment if we fail this duty. With time, so many of the things we once thought so important become unimportant. With effort, and a lot of luck, we may finally begin to understand the process of life and our role in that process, view and gain a real appreciation of all that life entails, attend to the duty that ethics demands, and be grateful for all the genetic benefits, the environmental benefits, and the help from so many others which made our life better. Strange, but when people win a lottery they don't go around saying they earned it. But given a lottery at birth via genetics and environment, we rarely have successes which we don't insist we earned ourselves. It's an ego thing I guess. This is not to say some don't play their cards dealt better than others, but you need some good cards to do well.
For me, with age, I have my own haunted house inside my own mind. This is where all the tragedies to others I have seen in my life reside. These tragedies I can never forget. They don't cause me to mope around in a depressive state, but they do reinforce my gratitude for my own good fortunes in life. Also inside my mind is a house of Angels in which all those who have supported and protected me in my life reside. I can never forget them either. Most possible combinations of egg and sperm never take place, and some that do have difficult lives, and others that do take place have varying degrees of good fortune. I don't worry about death but only fear I will not have control over my own dying process. Every person, when they have had enough, ought to have the right to die painlessly in a manner of their own choosing. Why fear death? I was not around for most of God's evolutionary process, and can't recall suffering any agony over it, so even if there is no Heaven, why would this be something to agonize over? We cannot miss what we are not a part of. Of course we want to be an eternal part of this process of life. Another case of enough is never enough.
Hardly anyone expresses a desire to die unless life has become insufferable to them. But then again, many live to an age in which they ask "What is the point to keep on living?" Today we can keep some of our cells functioning for long periods of time even though we are to varying degrees dead from the neck up, or reduced to a life in which few, if any of the things, we most enjoyed about life, are still possible. We can literally become a family and public nuisance at an expense which is growing exponentially. Perhaps we are not far from the day when there will be ancestral museums instead of graveyards where we can go in and be directed to a sealed flask of living cells which once were part of our great great grandfather, who is, of sorts, still alive. I can remember visiting my mother in a assisted living complex and having lunch with her and her assigned table companions. Here were all these once vibrant, productive, human beings who sat there, mostly in silence, with varying degrees of vacant stares, and I learned quickly not to ask a lot of questions because answering them was difficult for them. So conversation gets reduced to "Nice day".
It seems, for the aging mind, attitude is everything. Some go gently down the stream, and others, albeit feebly, keep trying to swim upstream, to places of former good times. I would tell my mother, "when paid help comes in your room don't burden them with complaints about your life which they cannot change, or they will avoid coming in your room". My mother was smart enough not to follow much of the advice I gave her over the years, but she did on this one and her pleasantness was rewarded by some of them coming in after their shift was over and playing games with her. In the last analysis we all die alone, no one can die with us. Fortunately, clarity of thought becomes replaced by some sort of mental fog in which we are mercifully spared the extent of our changed mental capacity.
We once knew nothing, we never did know all that much, and eventually, if we live long enough, we will regress to knowing less and less, having become twice a child. If we come to really understand the basis for God's evolutionary process, and the laws which govern this process, we can then accept our limited duration and importance to the process. By chance we got to live, and by chance again, live with particular genetic and environmental environments; and by chance again, with some manipulation on our part, to receive invaluable assistance from others on our journey through life, however short or lengthy our journey might be. Fair enough.
What about brain cell loss with age? There is no question but that our brains lose weight with age. And many past studies showed a loss of brain cells with age. BUT, more recent studies have shown that normal brains do not lose brain cells. People who suffer from Alzheimer's Disease do, and in the past these brains got mixed in with normal brains and thus the claim that all brains lose brain cells with age. Thus, the change in weight must reflect a loss of supporting cells with age. The truth seems to be that we know little about the change in brain function with age. All brain cells work by producing select neurotransmitters whose function is to stimulate, inhibit, block, or potentiate the neuronal activity of the next neuron. We really don't know just how efficient these activities are with age. Neurotransmitters are produced by each individual nerve cell. No one gets neurotransmitters via dietary habits or via injection. The best we can do so far is administer drugs which will inhibit, stimulate, potentiate, or slow destruction of particular neurotransmitters. Since a lot of neurons produce the same neurotransmitter there are many side effects. The amazing thing with neurotransmitters is just how long they exist---like nanoseconds. The entire operational milieu is a short lived precisely controlled activity. Thus, in the last analysis, our brain function is a chemical activity involving millions of cells interconnected via various pathways. It is no surprise we all 'think' differently and all our systems function uniquely in response to our central nervous system control mechanisms. Exactly how all this changes with age is going to vary and in ways which we currently know little about.
Those of us older know our bodies have changed in adverse ways affecting all our systems. Fortunately, the brain itself has no pain receptors, only the membranes around the brain do. We can often feel pain with the peripheral changes in our bodies, but fortunately we don't rise in the morning complaining because our cerebellum hurts or our hypothalamus hurts, or our post central gyrus hurts, etc. That's fine with me, mentally we can, in some sense, go gently down the stream to our mental terminational point. Others see and note our mental changes. As we age we sit around more and just think. With passing time often we just sit. I am going to take after my dad, whose answer to pressing problems in his latter years was always "To hell with it". That may be the best we can really do.
