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I am 65 years old and my poor body shows the wear, arthritis, a resection of the colon, loss of the right lower lobe of my lung, etc. I can still do some physical labor. My memory is still intact, so far as I can tell, but the recall time has gotten longer and less reliable, especially for recent memories. My mood has improved since I moved from L.A. to northern Arkansas.
I very much like your idea, my problem being my own incompetence in the three or four other languages of which I have a smattering. The works of our common heritage I know almost exclusively in translation. I suppose I could propose translations for inclusion. I have seen you reference Sanskrit in some of your linguistic comments.
I would suggest that the Vedas are a part of our common Indo-European Heritage. In that vein I will propose inclusion of the Swami Prabhavananda/Fredrick Manchester translation of The Upanishads, especially the Katha Upanishad. My own copy is an old paperback Mentor Classic. I have often found it to be a balm to my soul. "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
Aging is a topic I very interested in, obviously, as I am accumulating years of living and experince myself. However, I have been observing a phenomenon with people as they become older - that becoming older is also, and for me mainly, a state of mind. Physical problems all of a sudden are associated with age, though younger people might have the same kind of problems. Being tired is all of a sudden associated with age, when earlier it was stress or work or.... whatever, but not age.
About the slower memory, well, I like the metaphor I once read - the mind is like a computer, when its new it is fast retrieving information, but as you save more information on the hard disk, it takes longer to find the it again. I like to think that the mind functions the same way and that taking longer to remember something is a sign for a much vaster database that has to be searched. :-)
Oh, and I am aware that I am kidding myself to a certain degree. But I also firmly believe that our thoughts and expectations do have a tendency to be self-fullfilling.
To repeat, I consider age primarily to be a state of mind, and one sign of aging for me is the refusal to learn new things - for example, many of my friends refuse to learn about computers, or new languages or... because they are now of a certain age. Age also becomes an excuse. So, definitely, according to my definition you and PerCLupi are still youthful, as you are open to new and challenging experiences - like posting here on ET. :-D
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