Notes on a Nervous Planet(11)
A note from the beach
Hello.
I am the beach.
I am created by waves and currents.
I am made of eroded rocks.
I exist next to the sea.
I have been around for millions of years.
I was around at the dawn of life itself.
And I have to tell you something.
I don’t care about your body.
I am a beach.
I literally don’t give a fuck.
I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index.
I am not impressed that your abdominal muscles are visible to the naked eye.
I am oblivious.
You are one of 200,000 generations of human beings.
I have seen them all.
I will see all the generations that come after you, too.
It won’t be as many. I’m sorry.
I hear the whispers the sea tells me.
(The sea hates you. The poisoners. That’s what it calls you. A bit melodramatic, I know. But that’s the sea for you. All drama.) And I have to tell you something else.
Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body.
They don’t.
They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance.
And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion?
Why don’t you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are.
Just be.
Just beach.
How to stop worrying about ageing
1. Understand that old people aren’t actually that worried about old age, according to numerous surveys. The most recent one I can find was undertaken by American research firm NORC in 2016. It polled over 3,000 adults and found that old people are more optimistic about growing old than younger adults: 46 per cent of thirtysomethings said they were optimistic about ageing, compared to 66 per cent for the seventy pluses. It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young. And the main reason to be optimistic about old age is that old people themselves are. Resilience seems to grow.
2. It happens. Ageing is something we can’t do much about. We can eat healthily, exercise and live sensibly but we will still age. Our 80th birthday will still be on the same date. Sure, we can make it more likely we will reach 80, but we can’t stop the wheels of time. And the certainty is actually quite reassuring. When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. ‘Everybody dies,’ wrote Nora Ephron. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.’
3. The problems you associate with old age might not be the problems you have. You aren’t Nostradamus. You don’t know what you will be like when you are old. You don’t know, for instance, if your mind will decline or if it will shine ever brighter, like Matisse, who produced some of his best works of art in his eighties.
4. The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.
5. You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware – a nurse who worked in palliative care – shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie’s patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.
6. Embrace, don’t resist. The way to get rid of age anxiety might be the way you get rid of all anxiety. By acceptance, not denial. Don’t fight it, feel it. Maybe don’t inject yourself with Botox. Do some knifeless mental surgery instead. Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.
4
NOTES ON TIME
Fear and time
‘THE ONLY THING we have to fear is fear itself.’ That phrase, first uttered by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 during his inaugural speech as president, is probably the one I have thought about most in my life. It used to taunt me, during my first bout of panic disorder. Fear is enough, I used to think. The words have also been in my mind while writing this book. Like ‘time heals’ and all the best clichés, it has become a cliché for good reason – it has the power of truth.
When I think about my own fears, most of them are to do with time itself. I worry about ageing. I worry about our children ageing. I worry about the future. I worry about losing people. I worry I am late with my work. Even writing this book I worry I will fall behind deadline. I worry about the time I have spent unwisely. The time I have spent ill. And, while researching, I began to wonder about whether our concept of time is itself temporal. Has our attitude to time changed? Is the way to be free from fear to come to a new relationship with the tick-tock of minutes and hours and years? I feel if I can begin to understand the way my mind – and maybe your mind – reacts to the modern world, I need to look at time itself.
Stop the clocks