Older.Grayer. Slower.

There's nothing like sitting in a technology workshop with a room full of Gen X-ers to make you realize that old is not just a state of mind. This was the scary realization I came to this past week.

Forget all the attempts to persuade myself, otherwise: the hair color that hides my tell-tale grey roots; the anti-aging regimen that keeps my face from collapsing like California along an earthquake fault line; the chrome-colored trenchcoat that makes me feel youthful and more or less hip.

Outwardly, I can convince myself--and pretty often the general public in the right light--that I have stalled the biological clock. And then it happens. I'm asked a question that forces me to prove that no matter how young I may feel or even look on a good day, my brain is functioning on decreased capacity. I’ve begun to understand there’s a new meaning for the term “gray matter.”

The workshop was a two-day, twelve hour intensive on how to use a program called Joomla to create websites. Piece of cake, I thought--I can do HTML code in my sleep; I should be able to manage this without staring blankly at the computer screen when asked to download and unzip a file. Everything was going fine until our instructor decided it was time for a "quick review.” To my mind, this is the equivalent of playing "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" buck naked in front of your colleagues, and without the big money prize as motivation. Personally, I've never been good at group Q&A's, even with all my brain cells intact. Same thing with brainstorming sessions at work. Fire questions at me in a group setting and I go completely Anna Nicole. Call it "oops anxiety." I'm sure I'm not the only one who goes mind-numb under stress.

This time, though, it wasn’t anxiety keeping my tongue still. It felt more like my brain was a vast jar of peanut butter and whatever I was trying to get at was stuck all the way down at the bottom.

Okay, I thought, maybe it’s just info overload, which was my lame attempt to salve my growing inferiority complex. But the thick-brain symptoms continued for the rest of day and into day number two. It’s not that I didn’t know the answers; it’s just that I seemed to need a few nano seconds more than everyone else in the room for the information to leap across my synapses and form intelligent language. I decided it was more prudent to stay mute rather than embarrass myself by answering “eggplant” to a question about top menus versus main menus simply because eggplant was the first thing that popped into my head while the actual answer was lolly-gagging around my neural network.

Then came the moment-of-truth event I’d been avoiding—I asked a question.

“What if I don’t want a module to show up on all my sub-pages?”

Our instructor Brett who, enviously, has all of his brain cells in perfect working order said: “Where would you go to manage your modules?”

My notes is what I wanted to say. But since he was standing right behind me, expecting me to brilliantly maneuver my pointy arrow over to the correct tab that would prove I knew the answer, I could hardly be blithe. It took a few moments of anxious lip-biting, but I finally and insecurely said: “The module manager?”

That’s when it hit me: inside my fifty-four-year-old head was an octogenarian brain. Age may have made me wiser, but it had also made me feel like a conspicuous idiot in a world of rapid-fire data access. For me, it wasn’t just an intellectual awareness, it was also an emotional one. I grabbed my lunch and went out to my car where I sat crying into a handful of napkins. Even worse was that I resented feeling distraught about it. So I couldn’t grasp complex information as quickly as I used to. What was the big deal?

Well, the big deal was this: a lot of things about aging sneak up on us gradually: wrinkles don’t suddenly appear on perfectly smooth faces; our bodies don’t speed along one day and tremble on shaky legs the next. Aging gives us time to adjust to the changes that take us from one stage of life to the next. Aging tends to be, thankfully, slow.

But there are climatic moments—like scenes in a movie where everything changes when a shower curtain is drawn back and the knife blade comes into view—that leave you gasping and clutching at the arms of your seat. Fear, anxiety, distress, all come exploding to the surface.

Ultimately, the fact that my cognitive abilities are slightly more sluggish isn’t a major crisis. It’s not even enough of a crisis to make me tear into the Reese’s peanut butter cups that are stashed in my carry bag to sell for a fundraiser. Although I’m tempted. It’s just one of those “getting older” things I’m still trying to accept semi-gracefully like all the other changes this time of life brings.

A Naptime Manifesto

I don't know about you, but Sunday is one of those days that calls to me to put down my weary head and catch some zzzzzzz's. Forget the "to do" list. Let the clogged drain go another day. Stop frenetically thinking about my work load.

It's especially started to be less of an urge and more of an inescapeable phenomenon since I passed the half century mark. It's finally starting to hit me that all this bruhaha about fifty being the new thirty was made up by someone with a line of vitamins to sell. My body tells me otherwise. No matter how many really, really important things I have to do--like clean the cat's litter box; take my recyclables out to the garbage--my inner clock tells me it's snooze time.

The fact that the older I get, the more I need some mid-day downtime, came home to me after one of the rare Saturdays I had to work. It was an especially long day that started at 8:30 a.m. when I left the house and ended when I crashed on the sofa at around 3:30. I remember my daughter coming home around that time with a Tim Horton's bag, and the next thing I know, the same daughter was asking me what was in the plate in the refrigerator (left over chicken from my work-related function), and if she could eat it. I said, "Didn't you just come home with food?" And she answered me in that "duh, mom" voice that young people have, "Yeah, that was like four hours ago." Apparently it was nearly 7:00, and I had been conked out all that time.

I bring this up because I don't normally come home and crash for four hours at the end of the day, but by the time the weekend rolls around, all systems seem to want to go into a "pause" mode. I don't think that's an accident. Even God, the diligent designer of the universe, rested on the seventh day. I think there's a good reason for it. I believe the Great Allness was simply pooped and needed a guilt-free, unapologetic excuse to give in to physical, emotional, and spiritual fatique. Take a day off. Nap.

I'm coming to realize that we aren't a culture that allows for embracing our natural life rhythms, and that includes the need to curl up and shut down. Instead of appreciating the benefits of decreased capacity and the inevitable slowing of our functions, we chastise ourselves for sitting around on our doopas (a favorite word uttered frequently by my Lithuanian grandmother), and staring off into space. We associate "not doing" with being slackers, and that's a bad thing. Our little Baby Boomer brains are hardwired to our parents' immigrant work ethics. No slacking allowed.

Except our hard-working parents are now into full-fledged seniorhood and have something valuable to teach us about giving in to our body's inner wisdom. My mother, who's in her 70s, is a perfect example. On Christmas Day, I had the family over to my place. After everyone else went home, I popped in the DVD Wall-E. About midway through the movie, I noticed she had nodded off. She missed most of the movie, which, truthfully, I didn't get at all, but sat through, nonetheless; and when she woke up said, "that was pretty good." It made me think, maybe life is just as enjoyable if you snooze through some of it.

Sunday is a good day to reflect on this coming-of-age aspect of life, I think. We all need to make room for silence, for musing, for "not doing," for naps. If I'm snoring away on the couch, just leave me there. If it's that important, it can wait until I'm fully conscious.