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If it's not one thing it's another, so don't sweat it

As you age age you start to wonder whether things have just gotten tougher to deal with, whether your patience and tolerance is dissipating, or both.

You've begun to realize why your elders seemed so, well, grouchy about things. You realize that all those vows you made not to be like them are being drowned out by your own increasingly irritated thoughts.

You realize, with a start, that your favorite Sesame Street character is now Oscar.

I've discussed, in this space, how stressful just going to the grocery store can be -- especially at the end of the workday when everybody is picking up a carton of milk, a pack of rolls, veggies and such on the way home -- and on Sunday afternoons, which seem to have edged out Saturdays as far as the sheer Cecil B. DeMille epic-size numbers of people who are not just shopping for groceries but vying for them.

I've complained here, too, about the cost of living, and have fallen into that geezer stereotype of grumbling to hapless cashiers and other retail-establishment representatives about prices. (At least my gripe message to a favorite online clothing source about the drastic rise in their shoe prices was respectful. I didn't feel respectful.)

Regular readers will probably recall my written head-shake about how tough it seems just to get dressed and made up to go to a special event. A related lament: how tough it is to keep clothing -- especially special-event clothing -- clean, ironed, in good repair and fitting correctly/flattering.

Calgon, do take me away.

Annnnd there are the driving laments. The incidents of road rage popping up in the news are certainly proof that one doesn't have to be old to get fed up with others' driving. But then you start to think about your mature-age friends who have declared that they've stopped driving at night or on freeways, and you start to wonder what the heck you're doing behind the wheel at midnight or in somebody else's state, trying to navigate six lanes of traffic and fumbling for quarters to pay an unfamiliar toll. Maintaining a car, too, has become more burdensome.

You wonder how you managed to fool with all this stuff without complaining years ago, when your age started with the numerals 2, 3 and 4. After 50, everything became either a Herculean effort or brain surgery. I began to fully identify with a co-worker who's a bit older and notes that just preparing to make it into the office, and arriving there, feels like a full-time job in itself. Again, living has gotten more complicated, more technical, more expensive. Inevitably, as you get older and things get tougher to deal with, you find yourself "weighing one thing agin' the other" to decide what's important and what's not.

If wisdom has come with your advancing years, you start to fall in with the "good" stereotype, the one that runs counter to becoming more cranky and opinionated. You start to think that maybe some of the things you've fussed and fretted over and find to be more cumbersome/troublesome/expensive these days are, after all, expendable. And because you want to conserve energy, peace and sanity, you start to jettison some of the things you would have taken on without a thought when you were younger and more brash.

"Of course, these are all first-world problems," I recently heard a neighbor opine during a discussion about the common headaches we deal with every day. True.

Granted, selling your car and taking the bus or a ride-share service may not be for you. Stepping out in a turban, muumuu and knee-high hosiery with your knee-length skirts may not be an option. And even with delivery services now a thing, chances are you'd have to darken the door of that supermarket at some point.

But deciding to enjoy life more by refusing to sweat the small stuff -- and expanding your idea of what the small stuff is -- surely couldn't hurt.

If you find that as a result, you can leave the grouchiness with Oscar, so much the better.

Emailing: Still simple. Yea.

hwilliams@arkansasonline.com

Style on 04/15/2018

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