Stay Young

The Stay Young Book

Enough Time

“Had we but world enough and time…” - Andrew Marvell

What would you do if you had “world enough and time”? Most of us have a list longer than Saint Nick’s. You may never write it down, but it is there. You probably don’t even think of it that often. Still, there are tens of thousands of things that, at least once, you have thought of doing and skipped for one reason. “I don’t have time.”

You discovered early in life that people leave. Some time later that you made the scary leap. You figured out that someday your time would be up and you would have to leave too. Every day since an important part of you has been aware of not having enough time.

We live under a death sentence, every day of our lives. It can be a very scary thing. From before we are born, somewhere it is written that we are going to die. That much is certain, and that certainty would be frightening enough if it came alone.

It does not come alone. Unless you die young, it comes hand-in-hand with old age.

For a lucky few, old age is not too bad. For most people, though, it can be horrible. A friend’s father lived a powerful, healthy life into his late eighties. For him, everything started to go wrong at once. Now he is weak, ill, and bed-ridden, just waiting for the end. The last time his son visited, the old man grabbed him in a feeble grip and demanded of him, “What is the worst thing in the whole world?!” My friend suggested it might be dying. His father’s body shook with the intensity of his reply when he told him, “No! Dying is not the worst thing in the world. Growing old is!”

When I was young an adult explained it to me like this: “Getting old is ugly. Every year another part of your body shuts down.” For some the body fails completely. Some experience an even greater betrayal; the mind starts to die. More pieces fail every year. More drugs, more embarrassing tests, and more money are spent on just staying alive.

Worse, the quality of our life degrades. We can not eat the foods we used to enjoy. We cannot do the activities we used to do. Younger people grow impatient and often unkind. Our body starts to sag in strange places. Wrinkles and spots appear. Hair falls out of where it ought to be and grows in places it doesn’t need to be. Fat starts to show up in increasing amounts. And the simple process of living grows more and more uncomfortable. Growing old can be a terrible thing.

This book will not deal with death. It will not tell you how to cheat death or even how to be okay with it. That is a big issue, but not one we will address. Fortunately, there are amazing people like John Edward (of the television show Crossing Over™) and others working diligently to help us understand that what comes next is not frightening. It is just the next step.

This book looks, instead, at death’s frightening companion—aging. It explains how aging happens, how to recognize it, how to slow it down and eventually how to stop it.

Growing old is a mistake, an aberration, an error in our programming. It is an error that we can fix. This book will show you how.

When you do you will, at last, have world enough and time.

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