it was strange. usually, after three shots of brandy, i get usually sleepy. but not last night. i could not sleep, even if i tried to. i was told that when you get older, 41 to be exact, your sleep time diminishes: you sleep late but wake up early. father time, as it were, is taking its toll. the sleep hormone is fast depleting.
is this more physiological than psychical? or is it more philosophical, a tectonic paradigm shift about life?
when you reach forty-ish , the tell-tale signs are becoming, in the legal parlance, res ipsa loquitor – the thing speaks for itself: the hairline is fast receding, the knees start to wobble, the waistline turns immeasurable… ad infinitum. sleep problems come with the greying of the hair.
but the physical signs are mere manifestations of the changes inside. chemically, at the age of forty, the estrogen re-asserts itself. the male libido suddenly surges back as in the youth of the past, save for the organic weapon, which, due to constricted blood vessels, needs the chinese prescription , the happy king potion.
the hormonal changes necessarily trigger electro-physical reactions in the left hemisphere of the brain. at this stage, one becomes irritable, easily sex-cited with the twin peaks of the woman, and tends to go sporty in apparrel, in an attempt to hold back father time. the psychologist, if not psychiatrist, describes this as mid-life crisis, a wish to stay younger forever as against the lurking realities of aging, with all its pervasive signs.
between a wish and a reality which seems irreconcialable at this point in life, the deep-seated frustrations inevitably appears by way of the beers, and women – as if to prove that one can still do it and nothing has changed. at the philosophical level, becoming forty-ish is being in the threshold of youth and of age, of the gnawing reality that deep inside is the realization that life , or rather living, is a process of dying: that no matter what the facade one projects, inside lurk the fears, or rather, anxieties of death that may just knock anytime. and because death, or aging, is now in the doorstep, one has to leave his tracks on earth, good or bad, for the living to relive.
the focus to achieve for fame or infamy reaches its apex at this stage. normally, empires, a business or harem, take clear shape. the life project that would leave an indellible imprint is being realized, till the forty-ish marches towards his grave. But precisely due to the temporariness of life that we try to make it eternal, to live in the here and now, in a word, to be immortal by the seconds.
