Skip to main content

Middle-age peeves

Middle age is rather a difficult beast to deal with. Yes yes, the forties are the new thirties and all that, but the fact remains that being on the wrong side of forties has me grappling with physical and mental issues like never before.

For one, your skin and hair are not what they once were. Patchiness shows up on the face, and so do fine lines on the skin. The hair is greying at an alarming rate, and thinning with equal speed. Digestive problems have cropped up from nowhere. Joints have started creaking and sending alarming painful signals from time to time. And God knows what the state of the heart, kidneys, liver etc. are. No, I have not gone for regular check-ups as advised by all medical sermons.

The mind starts acting like it has its own mind. Swaying from chirpy and cool at one moment to black and filthy at the next, it becomes a challenge to keep in control. Pre-menopausal effects are here with a bang.

So what's the silver lining? It is the network of relationships I had taken time to build that stands me in good stead. My family puts up bravely with my raving and ranting, and patiently wait for me to calm down. Siblings and relatives have accepted my faults and are willing to let me be.

Professional acquaintances know that I cannot be messed around with. Though I have lost touch with most of my childhood and youth friends, I find myself building friendly and sympathetic relations along the way. Young people look up for advice and guidance, and let me admit, it does a lot of good to the ego.

So where the body and mind deceive, relationships save the day. Coming to the mathematics of life, that is not that bad. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does Mother Mary Really Come? You bet!

Prolific writer-activist-thinker Arundhati Roy's memoir, an ode to her mother's formidable personality, is cleverly titled, Mother Mary Comes to Me. Below the title is a picture of young Roy nonchalantly smoking a bidi. Irreverence, thy name is Arundhati Roy! At 372 pages, it is a tome, a sweeping saga that recollects both her mother's remarkable life, as well as her own. Is it a Memoir? Yes and no. Though the book title refers to their mother-daughter relationship, the book - at several junctures treats each one of them as independent and exclusive from one another. In fact, for a good part, her mother finds no mention at all, and the reader is engrossed reading about Roy's exploits and struggles through Architecture College, early attempts to find her vocation and calling, her dabbling with cinema, acting, scriptwriting; her romantic liaisons with the luscious JC, Sanjay, Pradeep et al. A life as extraordinary and unapologetic as Arundhati's mesmerizes in itself. ...

No Hopes for a Happy New Year

It's that time of the year again. When yearly round-ups are done diligently. Lists made, everyone sits down and assesses hits and misses. You tick off the "achieved goals" from your list. Make resolutions to fulfil the ones not yet surmounted. But I am doing something different. I am taking stock of my setbacks, my disappointments, the let-downs this year. I have absolutely zero expectations from the next year. Why? Because its useless to expect anything that I can't control. And since any chance of better days seems very unlikely, I am collecting the bits of my sanity to somehow trudge along the rest of my time on this planet. Why am I being such a kill-joy, you may ask? Well, not out of choice, certainly. What the world and my country, the air I breathe, the people I mix with, have become, all contribute to my rock-bottom expectations.  1. I am terrified, scared of what my country and its people have become. This wasn't the country I grew up in. It seems as if l...

The Sadness Within Us

A curious phenomenon has taken place over the years. Technology has advanced in leaps, modern medicine has become far more effective, we can control pain and disease far better, mental health is getting due attention, there are more avenues for creativity and entertainment.  Yet.... We are no longer able to be really happy. We are a chronically unhappy people. Forever dissatisfied, never content. Always thinking about the past or the future, never enjoying the moment. Think about it. When was the last time you were really, truly, wholly happy? Blissful, joyful? You slog hard at office, get that deserved raise/promotion, party hard to celebrate, and yet at the end of the day, a hollowness creeps in. An emptiness, a feeling of futility. You have a grand wedding - its the stuff Instagram dreams are made of. Your sweetheart looks like a million bucks with the latest designer lehenga, you yourself are spruced up, your family and friends are beaming, the event is going on swimmingly. Yet...