MELANCHOLY: A WAY TO HAPPINESS
So you’re sad about ageing. You’re moving closer to the end of life. Your body isn’t as strong and flexible as it once was.
Your friends are dying. You’re worried about your health. Your memory is slipping.
What’s to like about this aspect of old age?
Well, melancholy is as natural a mood as longing and delight and if you can’t find your way to appreciating it, it’s likely you won’t know happiness when you see it either.
Sadness is a natural part of ageing. You don’t have to medicate it or make efforts to be artificially happy to overcome it. In fact, if you accept this existential, natural sadness, it may not be overwhelming but instead only one strand of mood among others.
When you can live out the emotions and moods that float in or rush towards you, you may feel more alive,
less defensive and more present.
I recommend you avoid referring to this sadness as depression. It makes you think your melancholy at the passing of years is a sickness. Melancholy isn’t clinical.
You don’t go to a doctor or pharmacist complaining of melancholy. Simple, ordinary activities can improve your health and ease the black bile of melancholy that afflicts many older people.
Take that walk in the woods, look for a sparkling lake or river and don’t spend much time with negative people.
I feel the melancholy of age almost every day. I wish I could live forever. I don’t like the idea of death at all.
It forces me to accommodate it in some way and I don’t like that. Life can be difficult but it’s beautiful. What’s the alternative, anyway?
To make it even more frustrating, we don’t know anything about death. We can only hope for an afterlife.
Many intelligent people would say that afterlife is an illusion meant to comfort us. Woody Allen famously wrote, “I’m not afraid of death. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
My wife tells me she feels melancholy at night. I feel my melancholy in the morning, when I wonder how many mornings I have left. Your melancholy is your own and there are no rules about it.
As I search for a way to get rid of this nagging melancholy, I realise I have to come to terms with it. It won’t go away. It’s part of growing older.
I have to feel the melancholy, let it seep into me, let it transform me into a genuine older person who isn’t always trying to make it otherwise.
Age conquers. You can’t win. Let it be. Be older. Stand passionless in the exact age you are. No excuses, no denials, no sneaking away.
A good strategy for getting older is to let yourself be seen. Be public with your age. Don’t hide. Don’t excuse. Let people see you for who you are, even if your dark brown hair has turned smoky grey.