I don’t think I’m getting any older.

Oh sure, my body is aging, seriously impacting my ability to get around in a quick, pain-free manner, and yes, my brain is quite apparently aging, affecting my ability to access my memories as efficiently as I once did.  Or at least I think I did.  Didn’t I?

And I don’t mean to imply that I’m not growing.  I’m still learning and gaining experience.  My perspective on life is constantly evolving.  These and many other good things are still coming to me with the passage of years.

It’s just that, sometimes, in spite of these changes, I feel like the most essential part of me has never really changed at all.  I’m talking about the person I am, my personality or my psyche.  Perhaps you would call this my spirit or soul (which occupies and drives the vehicle that is my body), or my mind (which uses the computer that is my brain).  However you might define it, it’s just the thing that is me.  It’s not physical, it’s just tied to the physical (or so I believe).

And it hasn’t really changed.  Essentially, I still have the same strengths, talents, weaknesses, and insecurities I’ve always had.  I may be a little better at managing some of those aspects of myself, but I’m still the same person I always was.

I guess I’m suggesting that this essential part of a person is not really subject to the ravages of time.  It may be forced to struggle with how to operate an aging body that is breaking down, or an aging brain that is becoming less efficient at processing sensory input, or at organizing thoughts and words well enough to communicate effectively with others in this world.

But if a cell phone connection begins to break up, or drops altogether, you don’t automatically assume the problem originates with the person on the other end of the connection.  Likewise, if someone sends you a document that is completely or partially corrupted or garbled, you instinctively understand that the original message was intact.  The problem is not with the sender; rather, there is simply a breakdown of communication tools.

Why, then, do we assume that an inability to communicate effectively or coherently through an aging body is necessarily indicative of a psyche that is equally scrambled?

I’m sure most scientists would disagree with me, but I don’t think you can discount the possibility that, within those aging bodies, there are ageless souls who, having possibly lost contact with the outside world, are nevertheless intact and whole within the confines of their increasingly internalized worlds.  What appears to be confusion or catatonia to the rest of us is merely a melding of their very real internal worlds with the fragments they are still able to retrieve from the outside world.

And within those internal worlds that we can never see until the day we go there ourselves, these ageless souls are just the same as they ever were.  Just as young and vibrant.  They still find ways to love, to be loved, to laugh, to make others laugh and smile, to be amazed, to experience wonder, to experience and share life.

And someday, just perhaps, they will finally abandon their old broken-down vehicles and move on to something new.