Hope is a feeling of desire for a particular something to happen; a want.

Everyone needs to have at least some hope in order to keep their present morale up. Hope strengthens the immune system and consequently physical health.

“Live in the present, because that is all you have, the “NOW.”

How many times have you heard this admonition? Yet, the past and future are important also. It is a sort of illusion of time.

Although your life is the present, the past has influenced your present greatly and the future is the need which is essential to the present’s morale, having something to look forward to. Take away a person’s future and their present collapses.

The future will become the present, so you want to prepare for it. The present is important because it’s your reality. It’s also the time to prepare for a later reality, the future.

You need hope to keep moving forward. But with hope, letdown is possible!

Where there is little or no hope, there is hopelessness, otherwise known as depression.

Resignation is the reaction to depression. It is a feeling of accepting the knowledge that what has been desired will NOT be attained. But you still keep on, keeping on!

“Time is flying!” How many times have you heard that?

Time goes faster when you’re older for a few reasons:

When we are old, we have more past than future.

The young perceive a vast amount of time ahead of them, so time goes slower for them.

After fifty or so, our physical body slows down, so time appears to go by faster, because we are slower, but really time continues to move at the same rate!

In middle-age, everything comes and then is gone. The phrase: “And this too will pass,” is used constantly and it applies to everything and everyone.

If we are lucky enough to reach old age, the realization that we are no longer middle-aged is a devastating loss, but we must confront it.

In old age we start thinking about certain questions:

“What was the point of it all, this thing called life?”

“What is death?”

As far as the point of it all, you create your own meaning in life, it’s your responsibility.

Life is when the heart is beating, the blood keeps circulating, the lungs breathe and your brain still perceives. One is ALIVE, you eat, sleep, feel pain and joy.

In Death, there is a permanent cessation of all the vital functions: breathing ceases, the heart stops and the brain no longer reacts to stimuli, one cannot experience, think or feel. You become a corpse, fit for the worms to feed on or if cremated, ashes. There is nothing before birth and nothing after death!

So, in old age we must learn how to face death serenely, because it’s part of life.

I conclude this article with:

“ENJOY THE NOW. KEEP CALM AND DRINK WINE.”

Also published on Medium.