Annoyances
(what youngers call PITAs)
“With age comes wisdom… and a longer list of things we’re done pretending not to notice.” ~Me~
A few decades back, a friend of mine who was a decade older than I was shared a bit of wisdom. I had been complaining, mildly, politely, maturely, that my eyesight wasn’t as crisp as it once was. He looked at me, nodded with deep elder authority, and declared, “Annoyances!”
Said it like it was both a diagnosis and an accusation.
And then he launched into a glorious list of bodily betrayals: trouble peeing, random hearing drop-offs (not to be confused with selective hearing, which, when mastered, is a spiritual gift), vision that decides to take a personal day now and then, and on and on.
His point was brilliant: after a certain age, life’s frustrations migrate from the ‘pain in the ass’ category into the ‘annoyance’ category simply because arguing with them is as pointless as arguing with gravity. They are not going anywhere. Neither are we.
Recently, and I have no idea why, unless memory ambushes are now their own category of annoyance, I found myself revisiting that conversation. It made me wonder: besides health matters, what else rises to the level of “annoyance” for the average senior?
And if I were thirty years younger, would I even notice these things, or would I just skip merrily through life, whistling, completely unaware that the elders around me were quietly muttering at the universe?
So, I made a list.
