LERNING TO GROW OLD

I have among my most precious papers a letter-sized sheet, a pastern, which contains a fragmented text in ten parts titled LEARNIN TO GROW OLD written by a person named Joaquin Antonio Peñalosa.That little page that I have for many years I read it as if I did it for the first time every time I find it by digging into my files. I want to share this decalogue only with the interest of making these interesting tips available to you, and if in the interim I obtain some benefit, then glory to God. Here it goes:


1.- You will take care of your presentation every day: You dress well, arrange yourself as if you were going to a party. What more party than life!

2.- You will not lock yourself in your house or in your room: Nothing to play the cloistered or the voluntary prisoner. You will go out to the street and the countryside. Stagnant water rots, and the motionless machine becomes moldy.

3.- You will love the physical exercise, as yourself: A gymnastic time, a reasonable walk inside or outside the house. Against inertia, diligence.

4 .- Avoid attitudes and gestures of old collapsed: The head down, stooped back, feet dragging. No. Let people say a compliment when you pass.

5. Do not talk about your old age or complain about your ailments: you will end up believing that you are older and sicker than you really are. And they will cast you aside. Nobody wants to hear hospital stories. Stop calling yourself old and consider yourself sick.

6.- Cultivate optimism about all things: bad weather, good face. Be positive in your judgments, in a good mood in your words, always with a happy face, friendly in your gestures. You have the age that is exercised. Old age is not a matter of years, but of a state of mind.

7. You will try to be useful for yourself and for others: you are neither a parasite nor a branch voluntarily separated from the tree of life. Do everything you can for yourself and help. Help with a smile, with advice, with a service.

8.- You will work with your hands and with your mind: work is the infallible therapy. Any work, intellectual, artistic attitude ... is medicine for all ills, the blessing of work.

9.- You will maintain the human relations alive and cordial: of course, those that are knotted inside the home, integrating all the members of the family. There you have the opportunity to live with all ages: children, youth and adults; the perfect sample of life. Then you will expand your heart in favor of friends, as long as the friends are not exclusively old like you. Run away from the antiques bazaar.

10.- You will not think that all the past time was better: stop condemning your world and cursing your moment. Be happy that the roses bloom among the thorns. Positive always, negative never again. The old man should be like the moon: an opaque body, destined to give light.


#karibearteralrey / 4/9/2018