Old(er) 2: Old Woman Looking for Joy

I walk as an antidote to sedentary days. Today I take a lane that leads out of town and up a hill, under a railway bridge, then along a stream to a reservoir. There it ends and turns into a narrow, overgrown footpath, which is where I usually turn back. Dog walkers and joggers pass, then I walk on alone. Minutes later, three youths emerge from the trees, all wearing hoodies. At sight of me, two pull their hoodies across their faces. I grip my water bottle, which is metal, more tightly, in readiness for God knows what, for I’m an old woman, hardly likely to do them damage. Nonetheless, suspicion and the instinct to defend has kicked in. The third youth has not hidden his face and as we pass, he speaks a jaunty ‘hello’. We continue in opposite directions. My grip on the water bottle relaxes. Close to my turnaround point, there’s an abandoned car, a large rock bashed at the windscreen and embedded in the glass, which has crazed but declined to shatter. Flat tires. No licence plates. Inside are drawers and boxes, bits of furniture. On the way back, on a rutted track leading into a field, I spot fly-tipped rubbish - bags and pots, and open boxes of detritus. This isn’t the Cornwall tourists come for, and I return to my flat with exercise accomplished but drained of joy.

There’s not a lot of it about these days – joy. Some days the news just floors me. News highlights can be summarised as 1) war is coming and 2) we’re too late to save the planet, it’s over, we’re doomed. What is one supposed to do with ‘news’ like that? I put ‘news’ in apostrophes because is that really news, running around like Chicken Little shouting ‘the sky is falling’? It might very well be falling, but how is one meant to respond to that? Make a placard? Write to one’s MP? The sheer uselessness of this information is overwhelming. Nothing that I can personally do will make Putin or Netanyahu or Trump sane and reasonable men. It galls me that such stunted but powerful men get to play with people’s lives, but galled I shall remain. Nor is there anything I can personally do to reduce air traffic and stop glaciers from melting. I can cry and thrash about and weep for England and none of it will matter a whit.

When despair takes hold, I don’t want to go for a walk, or weed my allotment, or read, or move. I want only to sit and to be distracted. Hello-o-o, Netflix. Which must be doing pretty well out of the daily news.

Aging is also depressing. Just as I’m powerless to save the world, I’m powerless to make myself younger. At 3 a.m. I lie awake and face the certainty of my extinction. Even my body feels heavier, oppressed by that black cloud of thought that fills head and heart. But if I’m brave and look into it, I find it’s not death I fear most, but the last years before death, the waiting for death, the days of just filling days without purpose, the days without goals. In my 77th year, the future is behind me. For the elderly, days consist of just getting through the day. Ambition is for the young. What takes its place is waiting for The Thing That Will Finish Me Off. What’s that ache under the armpit? Is that a new mole on my leg? That tickle in my throat has been there for days – is it just a cold or something worse?

Is there anything an old person can do to shift that debilitating frame of mind? How much control does one have to alter a glum frame of mind, to break through apathy? At 72, my depressed mother went to a therapist and was informed that depression was natural at her age – a mere 72! – because her life was coming to its end.

I ponder on what goals I might set myself, life-enhancing goals, something more than just filling the hours successfully. Joy comes to mind. Its absence in an old person’s life. To someone naturally inclined to look on the dark side, working towards joy would be a challenge. How does one apply the active verb ‘to do’ to raise the amount of joy in one’s last years? It’s easier to settle into the familiar slough of despond, and just start scrolling.

Or is joy aiming too high? Does joy belong to the young? I’m thinking of my grandsons in the sea on their bodyboards, radiating joy as they leap into waves, joined to the elements, each wave a fresh goal. Perhaps an old woman should forget joy and settle for contentment. One can sit a long time in a state of contentment, on a summer afternoon for instance, with a bee visiting the oregano, and the air soft with a bit of breeze, good drying weather for laundry, and chicken marinating in the fridge for supper. One can be grateful for contentment.

But contentment has a sense of passivity about it, less of the verb ‘to do’, and old age is already weighted with passivity. I think of contentment almost like the absence of emotion. “At this moment, I’m okay. Nothing is upsetting me. All good.”

What does an old person do to create joy, to experience not just a satisfied state but an identifiable heightened pleasure? As the joints stiffen and muscles weaken, where does an old person find joy?

The first permutation of the verb ‘to do’ comes to me as ‘to notice’. I begin with micro-joys. Supper is a salad containing my own-grown borlotti beans, with a maple syrup and ginger dressing that is so delicious, I tear off chunks of bread to mop up every drop of dressing in the bowl. My children, who are children no more but now have children of their own, make me laugh as they exchange funny rude messages on WhatsApp. A cat that is not mine walks in and lies down, certain of its authority to own a spot under the table.

Micro-joys. Some days that helps to get you through. It’s a start.