On aging gracefully...................

"Wherever I turn I see fresh evidence of my old age.  I visited my place just out of Rome recently and was grumbling about the expense of maintaining the building, which was in a dilapidated state.  My manager told me the trouble wasn't due to any neglect on his part: he was doing his utmost but the house was old.  That house had taken shape under my own hands; what's to become of me if stones of my own age are crumbling like that?   Losing my temper I seized at the first excuse that presented itself for venting my irritation on him.  'It's quite clear,' I said, 'that those plane trees are being neglected.  There's no foliage on them.  Look at those knotty, dried-up branches and those wretched, flaking trunks.  That wouldn't happened if someone dug round them and watered them.'   He swore by my guardian angel he was doing his utmost:  in everything his care was unremitting but the poor things were just old.  Between you and me, now, I had planted them myself and seen the first leaf appearing on them myself."

"So I owe it to this place of mine near town that my old age was made clear to me at every turn.  Well, we should cherish old age and enjoy it.  It is full of pleasure if you  know how to use it.  Fruit tastes most delicious just when its season is ending.  The charms of youth are at their greatest at the time of its passing.  It is the final glass which pleases the inveterate drinker, the one the sets the crowning touch on his intoxication and sends him off into oblivion.  Every pleasure defers till its last its greatest pleasure.  The time of life which offers the greatest delight is the age that sees the downward movement - not the steep decline - already begun; and in my opinion even the age which stands on the brink has pleasures of its own - or else the very fact of not experiencing the want of any pleasures takes their place.  How nice it is to have outworn one's desires and left them behind!"

Seneca,  Letter XII, Letters from a Stoic