To Ease the Passing of Time

Since we retired a few years ago, my wife and I like to go on cruises. As you probably know, there are a lot of old people traveling on cruise ships, especially with cruise lines like Princess, Celebrity and Azamara. I’m 67 and my wife is 66, and if you think that’s old, you’ve never been on a cruise ship on which most passengers are senior citizens. A lot of them are in their 80s or even 90s. We are often considered as the young couple at the dinner table where we sit with three or four other couples ten or fifteen years older than us.

One night, when we came to our table for the first time, I quickly noticed that the three men already seated didn’t look too pleasant. They looked serious and stern and none of them was smiling. I thought to myself: My God, it’s going to be a long frigging cruise, having to spend a couple of hours each night with those grumpy old men! It turned out that those grumpy looking old men were not at all what they appeared to be. They were friendly, very funny, and had a lot of interesting stories to tell. I asked myself why they looked so frigging serious and boring when I first saw them. The answer may be in “the law of gravity.”

Let me explain! I’m not talking, of course, about Newton’s law of gravity. What I mean by “law of gravity” is that, as a man gets older, his skin tends to loosen and fall down a little bit. As a result, his smile disappears and he jstarts looking more grave; and because of that stupid law of gravity, some poor old fuckers end up looking like they are always mad and unhappy even when they are not.

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying that there are no real grumpy old men out there, but I only think that the real ones didn’t wait to be old to become grumpy and mad. They were always that way, even when they were young and didn’t look the part. Their skin was more firm and they looked like they were smiling all the time, but that was just an illusion. Inside, they were angry, mad and pissed off at everybody and everything but nobody could tell.  

What can happen when you start looking stern and grave because you skin is not was it used to be? On top of having the look, you’ll eventually become the grumpy and mad old man that you appear to be, but who you know, deep down, is really not who you truly are. Why? Because the way a person looks often dictates how people interact with him or her. You’ll unconsciously see yourself through the eyes of the people you are interacting with and progressively become different from what you were… only because of the new way people look at you.

So when you see an old man who looks a little grumpy and like he is in a bad mood, like the ones I met at our dinner table on the cruise ship, don’t let his appearance deceive you. Talk to him, make a few jokes and see how he responds. A lot of old men are still a lot of fun and "still crazy" after all these years; it just doesn’t show as much as when they had the appearance to go with the mood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo1naJEacE8