What Makes People "Old"

People begin to "age" when they no longer take in new information -- but only rely on their past (old) information, memories and knowledge -- in meeting the challenges of the present moment(s).  As such, their responses are not likely to be as effective, productive and vital, as one who is taking in new information all the time -- while realizing even that is incomplete.  The "old mind" thinks that the information they learned 50 years ago, is all that can be known -- and so it is a waste of time, to learn anything more, or new.  That is what makes people old -- whatever age they are.

It is not that age is just a number -- but more a way of life -- in constantly taking in the new (information), rather than thinking that the old information (usually discovered and told to them by someone else), is the eternal and unvarying truth, and there cannot be anything beyond what was discovered and handed down thousands of years ago, a hundred, or even ten.

They are likely to claim that what was thought one thousands years ago, is superior to the understanding of today -- even in medicine, engineering, production, industry, athletic performance, social relations, etc.  It is enough that the primitive rules should prevail for all time -- even that might should still prove right in every case, using the most delicate and finely-tuned instruments.  the most familiar and constant, is the human body itself -- each one's own, and how they master it throughout their lives -- never failing to listen and learn, what their own bodies are telling them.

Those who turn a deaf ear, become more and more insensitive to their own "being," with naturally disastrous consequences.  Many who should know better, will insist that the body alone tells one nothing -- but that one must listen to all the experts (teachers) telling them what they should do -- in preference to their own common senses.  And so many, by following such advice, never develop a familiarity and confidence, in relying on their own faculties of discernment and discrimination -- but always defer to those "authorities," who claim that jurisdiction for themselves -- to tell everybody else, how and what to think -- as the only way one should be allowed to think.

This was the same way before every "revolution" in history -- when the mass of people, broke away from those constraints -- to develop another way of living and being -- that the institutions and traditions perpetrate and perpetuate, to keep themselves in control and power.  It is also done most commonly at the personal level of human relations -- as the interface of every individual with the greater world they live in.

That absolute control of one's environment, can be exercised and achieved, if the world never changes -- which is only possible in the minds of individuals, as their fixed ideas, taking in no further information -- regardless of what they already know.  In this manner, even those with a lot of knowledge (of the past), can fail to meet the challenges of the new and present moment -- and may prove to be the hindrance, at which they fall from the state of learning, and become increasingly "old," in cutting themselves off from the vital nutrients and information of the present environment, which is the ever-changing world around them.

It is not that the world is changing more than ever before -- but more that we are aware of that more than ever before -- except for those who choose not to be aware of such developments, because they prefer the world of fifty years ago -- rather than learn about, and adapt to the new.  The person always adapting to the latest information, is not becoming old and obsolete in that way -- separating (isolating) themselves from life itself, in preference for another time at which they thought they were at their best -- many years, or even lifetimes ago.

Increasingly, that is the reality they choose to live in -- and become increasingly inaccessible to the new world unfolding daily around them.  That is why people become old, irrelevant and ineffective -- and not that it has to necessarily be the fate of every life.