For aging, one thing I have noticed, as I mentioned before, is how poorly American society prepares our culture for aging, and to me, what is surprising most of all is how sometimes these seismic changes occur so quickly in one's life.  I keep telling people, I can't believe how drastically my thinking and perceptions have changed or evolved in the last five years and especially this past year and a half.

And for me, these changes have little to do with sudden shifts in political or philosophical positions, but more to do with basic human life in American society, and how little our culture even approaches such topics. 

For example, lately, I have noticed even my most favorite songs are interpreted in different ways by my brain. I have noticed as time goes by, many of these songs gather new nostalgic baggage because, for people like me, favored songs are also like my own personal history bookmarks and force recall of such wonderful past times, but are also reminders of how my own world has changed and how many of these songs are linked to people now passed or to experiences that can never be replicated, repeated or recreated.

It's like, when you follow a group of musicians, actors, writers, or other such aspects, how do you find a replacement for them after fifty or more years?

This includes social circles - how do you re-start and replace relationships you have had for decades?

Then, it is rarely openly discussed how aging forces one to start thinking more and more in terms of mortality and to search for not only the meaning to life, but the meaning of one's own life as well.

Then, even food is interpreted differently.  At first, I thought this was more related to physical changes in one's body, but after speaking to more and more older people, I am learning that such a thing is not uncommon.  That even food changes for age. Yes, maybe it is due to the habit of eating the same foods for decades, but lately, I am finding foods I used to love taste different (oddly, one time in an old episode of Happy Days, Richie Cunningham explained the joy of not having a milkshake every day and what it meant to just have one every now and then - that having one every day removes the specialty of a periodic milkshake, but it is more than that).

Another aging aspect that has entered my mode of thought is that of "why bother" on so many things because such things may not have a noticeable impact whatsoever on anything.

Don't get me wrong - the struggle comes from interpreting taking on some sort of behavior that may not matter versus one that will matter and finding the desire to find those things that do matter and cutting out those things that will not matter.

In other words, my point is, find those things that do matter and ignore those that don't, but sadly, so many don't matter. 

Lastly, back to how our culture does not foster the appreciation of the process of aging and to indicate how poor out society is about this area, ask yourself, how many times have you asked yourself or heard others ask, "I wish I had asked better questions of my loved ones before they passed" or, "why didn't I ask my father, mother, grandparents, et cetera, this question?"

I know I ask myself these questions almost every day and regret being just like so many others. 

Possibly, I believe some of this is related to America's horrible approach to death and dying - it's like our society purposely hides death and dying and has continued to remove it more and more from our national dialog (and largely, in my opinion, mostly due to the promise of American society making money off of death and dying - watch, soon, cremations will cost as much as a burial).

If one thinks about it, our American "mid-life crisis" needs to be changed to an "end of life crisis."