The pleasure of a long life and turning back the clock

Here is a real paradox. We want to live long and enjoy our lives. Indeed, one of the most generous wishes a person can make you is that you should live long. This is what lies behind the dear extravagant birthday formula about “blowing a thousand and one candles”.

The candles are, of course, the ones we have on the cakes we cut, share and munch to celebrate our birthdays. But the paradox is that we want to eat our cake and have it. In other words, while we celebrate the addition of each year that the birthday makes to our lives, we fear the prospect of getting old. 

The fear becomes even more pronounced as we tilt towards the upper ends of the “transition decades”, the over 40s, the over 60s or, as in my case, the over 70s. It is manifested in different ways, including the dyeing of hair, the masking of wrinkles, the pursuit of intimate liaisons with younger partners, sugar babies or “spring chicken”, and even plastic surgery, to give ourselves a literal facelift.

Another common strategy is the locking of the clock, or even turning it back altogether. I believe we all know people who have been, and still are, “twenty or thirty-something” ever since we first met them, a handful of decades ago. Turning back the clock is one of the most amusing — or is it saddest — tricks in the game.

OLD AS YOU FEEL

Here, we just arbitrarily pick on a date in history, several decades behind our true birth year, and claim that that is when we came into this world. In a more drastic form, we simply reverse the figures in our true age and, voilà, the resultant figure is our “official” age. Actually, I was thinking of playing just that prank on you, when I turned 73 recently.

But then, I got a startling message from my Scottish bosom friend, Dr Alastair Niven, OBE, a former Director of the Africa Centre in London and, later, the Cheltenham House think-tank nearby. “I was 73 a few days ago,” wrote Alastair, “but think my mother must have mis-registered my birth, as I feel about 37.” Well, I suppose the joke is on me!

Alastair, my age-mate, is a very close and longtime colleague and confidant. Back in the early 1970s, we shared a study in the English Department at the University of Sterling, where I was doing my training and lecturing attachment shortly after my recruitment by Makerere. You know, in those days they did not let you loose on students just because you had a first-class degree or a graduate qualification. You had to be tried and tested in all the time-hallowed scholarly and academic traditions.

Alastair, who had himself been taken through his paces at the University of Ghana at Legon, took readily to me at Stirling and we struck up a lively camaraderie. He was eventually to be best man at my wedding in Dunblane in 1972. I told you about that, back in 2014, how Alastair, clad in a glorious Scottish kilt, stood by me, arrayed in a Kiganda kanzu, beside my bride, bedecked in a voluminous snow-white gomesi.

Anyway, if Alastair feels like 37, why shouldn’t I feel the same? After all, the two digits that make up my true age are there in that figure. The real point, however, is the oft-repeated dictum that age is just a figure, and you are only as old as you feel. In other words, we should not be unduly obsessed with the mathematics of the advancing years.

This, however, is not to gloss over the dubious and sometimes sinister reasons why some patently senior citizens try to fidget with their ages. To those in jobs which require them to retire at a certain age, the temptation is strong to try, by hook or crook, to turn back the clock and add a few more years to the job. We have even heard of some who would like to cling on to their offices even from the other side of the grave.

The secret of an enjoyable advanced age, however, is to “add jobs to the years”. Similarly, instead of pining for more years to our life, we should aim at adding more life to the years.  This is what I have learnt from my own enjoyable “great” age, and especially from the lives of my fellow senior citizens whom I take as my own mentors and inspirers.

STELLAR EXAMPLE

I told you some time back of Muthoni Likimani, now well into her nineties, who is working on several book projects. She reminds me strongly of my heart-throb, Florence Howe, the founder of the Feminist Press of New York and the initiator of the Women Writing Africa and Women Writing India projects. We will be celebrating her 88th birthday on Friday, March 17.

Florence is still writing, publishing and doing international lecture tours. She also has a mind-stimulating blog on the internet. Now, that is what I call adding jobs and life to the years, and that is what I think all the truly admirable elders I know have in common. They keep working, and the work seems to keep them going and enjoying life.

We note that these people do not work for survival but mostly for love of the work and for humanity. Saturday Nation readers will remember the recent heart-warming story and pictures of Yusuf and Marie Dawood making a donation, through one of their foundations, to the education of underprivileged children. I noted with surprise that my friend Dawood, of the Surgeon’s Diary fame, will soon turn 90.

I was also stunned to learn that Dawood has donated to charity all the royalties earned from writing his column over the past 35 years! Does that in itself not add life and joy to the good Doctor’s life? I wish I could emulate him.

Maybe I will, if I live to be 90, and I keep writing, while you keep reading me.