Growing Old Slowly, and Dying

YOU START OPUT in life with everybody older than you, and you become accustomed to living in a world in which everyone is older than you. Only slowly and gradually does that change, until one day you look up and realize that a good many, indeed most of the people you see in the world look younger than you, because they are younger than you. It never seems like you're exactly in the middle. Either you're old, or you're young. And the world begins to fill up with old people. Old people, living longer, old people everywhere. It must be strange, to be so old that everyone you see is younger than you. The world is getting older, and it seems that someday there will be many old people and not very many young people. The eternal search for the fountain of youth is more intense, but no further along than ever. At this stage in human history, with over population and a birth rate that is slowly slowing down, porlonging life indefinitely might not be in the best interests of mankind in general. Looking at old trees, you can retrace their history. You can see where the branches have been sawed off, and where they have grown at gnarley angles, and where whole sections of the tree have fallen off. We can do something similar by observing individual people, and their personal histories. Watching your own parents age and approach death is as stressful an event as life has to offer, and it offers many stressful events. From an early age we humans understand that we can die at any moment, at any age. Still, we never really believe we are going to die, maybe even up until the actual point of death, and maybe even then when we die, we die know believing that we are dying. Perhaps even people with terminal illnesses know thay are going to die with their illness - tomorrow. Whatever works. We all find out the answer to this question, but when we do, we can't report the results.