6 August

A friend whose 94-year old mother is ailing made a fascinating observation to me today. Often people at that age are said to be losing their marbles, but he believes they're actually going through a profoundly sophisticated transition time. The behaviours we see as doddery and vague and a sort of breaking-down are actually sophisticated adjustment processes. Just as children's development looks simple on the outside, but is actually extremely sophisticated. We need to re-frame the old as doing really complex things that we can't quite understand, not dysfunctional things. My view is that this is related to how we don't understand time too. I've posted how I don't see death as the end of life, but as the end of actual rather than virtual life. What the Buddhists call shifting between different states of consciousness. Interestingly the old often 'lose their memory'. You can't actually lose your memory because memory is the past and the past doesn't 'pass', it's always just here, virtually. So I think the old are often already living and exploring a completely different relationship to time than we understand, which we can only see as them losing their memory. We 'read' both the young and the old through our own mid-life frames, which don't fit.