Growing Old Gracefully

"As youth recedes into the rearview mirror, and your face slides south in succumbing to time and gravity, and your joints ache from decades of overuse, and your short-term memory becomes a sieve, something curious happens. You get happier. I don't mean the ecstatic happiness you periodically feel amidst the turbulence of your teens or 20's. I'm talking about a growing contentment, an acceptance of yourself and of life as it is, a grateful appreciation for each moment that you continue to draw breath. As the wise old coots  interviewed in our Last Word this week would tell you (see page40), it's not a bad thing to know - to really know - that the number of your remaining breaths is finite."   (Copied from the Mar. 12, 2012  issue of, The Week, by William Falk)

The preceding is a grain of wisdom harvested from the copious magazines on the tables populating the fertile waiting rooms of MD Anderson. As I read that pearl, I thought to myself, I want to be that person, the one who is a friend of contentment,  a lover of my own soul, as well as the souls of others, one not given to bitterness or sour tones, the one who adds flavor to blandness and passion to the ordinary and the mundane, AND DO THAT as  "age" becomes a verb, as in "to age" for which Roget lists as synonyms,  

Main Entry:	age/eɪdʒ/ Show Spelled
Part of Speech:	verb
Definition:	become older
Synonyms:	decline, deteriorate, develop, get along, grow, grow feeble, grow old, grow up, mature, mellow, push, put mileage on, ripen, wane

As I "age", I do decline, deteriorate, and all those other things listed above and they are an automatic and a natural result of aging and they do not tend to make me happier. It don't work that way though do it? (Pardon the vulgar.) I really want to share the writers optimism, that this growing old gracefully is an automatic corollary of the geriatric process. I do, so want to be that kind of person. Yes sirree Bob.  For me though, it does not come naturally, nor automatically. I do, though, repeatedly resolve, to weed out the sprouts of bitterness and  the roots of crabbiness and to not cultivate covetousness and resentment and all "The heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks that Flesh is heir to."(Shakespeare says through his man, Hamlet)  I want to be that person who becomes happier, the one Mr. Falk is fortunate enough to know. I must admit sometimes it works and I catch glimpses of that guy. He just never sticks around long and I find myself asking, "Who was that the guy?' 

   ¹⁸ For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.^[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹ For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰ Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
²¹ So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²² For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³ but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. ²⁴ What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? ²⁵ Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!  Romans 7:18-25 NIV