My brain has always moved at lightening speed, leaping and bounding ahead of rational thought while my body lagged sadly behind, moving in fits and starts. This has been tricky but I have learned to live with it. In any moving group, I will be the straggler at the end. Meanwhile my brain will have climbed a dozen mountains, scaled to the tops of stately pine trees and flown across the skies with swirling masses of cloud form. In my current metamorphous, both body and mind have slowed down with my body becoming downright sluggish. This seems to be annoying to everyone around me as they trip past me, try to squeeze me out of the way and sometimes rudely bump into me. I don’t relish being a hindrance to other life forms but it seems to have come to that. I would love to fly gracefully through my day, never fumbling for charge cards, money or tickets. But that is not to be my lot and I must endure the body that has been assigned to me. Yet how glorious it is when someone smiles at me or waits for me or tries to help. I wish I had learned earlier in life to be kinder to the strangers you meet every day.
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Though no one in their right mind would admit to it, I think most people in this country have lost their respect for older generations. It's not just that they get impatient with you, Grammie, or whoever is moving or acting slowly, but they are impatient with the idea that they too will have to slow down one day. That they cannot always run the world at break-neck speeds. Trust me, in the middle and high school hallways at my school, it's the teachers who are always jumping out of the way or being bumped into (of course, we then have the authority to berate or punish that student). When is the last time any of us helped someone across the street? Or held a door open for someone? But it's even worse for the elderly, because we have raised entire generations to believe that speed and ability to multitask are what makes a person valuable.
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