“I’m not aging; time is passing.”
I believe thinking in terms of of “aging” makes you grow old by prompting you to make bad choices. There are people far older than me with far greater physical limitations who are at the same time more physically fit, more well adjusted, and more active. I also know people far younger than me who’re well on their way to their first heart attacks.
But, there are realities to the passage of time. For example, I’ve already been diagnosed with overwork once, and have felt myself come close to burnout twice before, yet I have no desire to stressing my way into my first heart attack. Apparently I’m not quite as good as tolerating the amount of stress I used to put on my body during finals week at Georgia Tech.
So this has prompted me to learn to chill out more and relax, just like about fifteen years ago the sight of my relatives felled by heart attacks prompted me to improve my diet and exercise. You can’t necessarily prevent a heart attack, but you can stop doing the things that make them more likely.
But beyond that, there are still realities. Sometimes they’re obvious – arthritis in the knee, a bone plate in the arm, the loss of hair. Sometimes, however, they surprise you.
Pictured above is a charger for my wife’s digital camera. I came in from church today and heard a high pitched whine. It took me a few moments to localize it to the charger. (Or perhaps a component has failed in the light sensor next to it, but since that hasn’t whined before and it seems to be working I’ll exclude it. OR I could use the scientific method and unplug it and see if the whine stops. Ok, it does. Strong evidence it is the source of the whine. SO ANYWAY…)
But then something peculiar happened. I turned my head and the noise went away.
After a few minutes experimentation, I’d confirmed it: I can only perceive the whine in my left ear. If I plug my left ear and press my right ear to the device, I can pick up a very, very slight whine, but nothing like I can hear with my left.
So: upper range hearing loss – also known as ski slope loss – localized to my right ear.
I had my hearing extensively tested about a decade ago, and I know I already had very mild hearing loss (well within the normal adult range) and left-right asymmetry. But I don’t think it was quite this dramatic, which probably means that it’s worsened a tad. A visible – no wait, audible – sign of *gasp* aging.
Not all of the passage of time is bad: my vision has essentially been improving in the last few years. Even though I’ve got a touch of presbyopia and my eyes can’t tolerate contacts as well, my myopia has slowly been fading, which counteracts the above. But it’s interesting to see it demonstrated so dramatically.
-the Centaur
