To Ease the Passing of Time

The big fears are quite obvious: the fear of losing your autonomy and independence, the fear of losing your mental faculties, your memory slowly fading to nothing, the fear of not being able to do the things you used to do by yourself only a few years ago, like driving, looking after your bank accounts, and paying your bills. There is also the fear of ending your life like a zombie, surrounded by other zombies, who don't remember who they were and don't know where they are, and who are stuck in a cold and lonely place from where they can escape only by dying. Talking about dying, there is always that fear of dying alone, without anybody you know around you.

Those are the big fears. Some people like me, in their seventies, will tell you that they think about those things sometimes, others will tell you that they think about them all the time, and others, probably the minority, will tell you that they never think about those things that may or may never become their reality. There is always the possibility that you will die in your sleep, have a massive heart attack, or die in a plane crash or a car accident, right?

What I call the small fears are those little but not so dramatic changes that you have already experienced but that have not yet changed your life completely. I’m talking about things like when you realize that you talk to yourself a lot more than to others, the fact that when you are talking or writing, you are not sure whether or not you are able to communicate in an a way that makes sense to everybody, not just you. Ways of communicating, even in your own language, keep changing and evolving. There are also the new ways of thinking and expressing your thoughts and ideas, new references, codes and shortcuts that you don't know. Sometimes, especially if you don’t have a lot of contacts with different types of people of different age groups, it makes it very difficult to keep up with and adapt to those changes.   

Technology is also a big challenge for some people who are getting older. When it comes to technology, I rely a lot on Maria. She has been paying our bills online for years; she knows how to store our plane tickets and hotel reservations on her phone when we travel. She knows how to retrieve the information encoded in those little squares that look like a maze that you see everywhere nowadays. I don’t even know what they are called and what the hell they are for. They look like this:

With all those changes, I realize that I would not be able to travel and do a lot of things by myself.

Today, I did not have anything to write about, and I didn’t really feel like writing anyway. If I forced myself to write, it’s because I think it’s a good way to keep my brain functioning normaly, the same way exercising is supposed to be good for your body. Doing something to try to prevent the things you can see coming from happening too soon is a good way to deal with your fears. Whether it works or not is not important; It makes you feel like you are doing something. That’s the way I see it anyway.

P.-S.: Maria has just told me that the squares that look like mazes are called QR codes.