Every day is a new day

Aging means starting new work by oneself. “Everything changes. (…) We have to take a new role with commitment and consciousness – excepts from Goethe’s “Principle and Reflection.”

My day starts with reading the morning every day, while having breakfast. Since some time ago, I carefully read obituaries, and compare the deceased person’s age (written in the bracket by his or her name) with mine. When the age is smaller than mine, I realize myself who has aged too much and when it is larger, I feel as if I have enough time to enjoy life.

Life, not death, determines the quality of death. His or her life was great not because the death was eulogized in the obituary but because the life itself actually was. As such, people should be sincere to their life until they die. That is the value of their dignity and age. People have to be worth their age. It is all the more so at an advanced age.

For sure, we can never prevent our aging and death, and we need to familiarly accept these as proceeding of life, and thus exert efforts to ensure that at least the very existence of aged persons will not become worthless or useless. Everyone would feel regretful and sad about getting old, but the fact I even have come to get a sense of joy for getting old has been possible thanks to self-reflection on our senescence.

As Schopenhauer said, ‘Everyday is small life,’ every day is a new day. The question is how I will spend my new day. I will try to focus on today or now, which is the youngest day in my remaining life, rather than on dreams for the future. Now is the time when I feel the value of life, while maintaining youth and vitality in mental aspect, and now is when I appreciate the beauty of reflection on the fruit of life, which I have built up by myself, even though my body is continuously aging and weakening.

I have not been hospitalized yet, I still care about my appearance and can carry out tasks, big and small daily, and therefore I would naturally feel satisfied with now. As long as we continue to love our own work feeling as if we are young, we are not aging but becoming new every single day. We are always young enough to do something.