Thoughts after attending a recent conference.

What’s the first sign that you are getting old? Is it the grunt and getting up from a chair more deliberately? Is it a slowing pace up a hill you used to run? Is it thoughts, now deeper and buried among decades of useless knowledge, harder to access and tripping your tongue? Is it that the tools you designed and forged are rusting and the welds weakening? Is it trying a new tool but getting lost and your mind muddled by merely the instructions? Is it in watching others, youthful, vigorous, demonstrate mastery of something you do not know, can’t understand, and can hardly interpret their language? Is it the memories of the problems and solutions and newer problems and almost solutions and the generations on generations of friends that you fought alongside, brothers and sisters in arms against ignorance, that have all left for greener pastures and more favorable winds, leaving you nearly alone? Is it watching history repeat or rhyme or alliterate because there are really only but a handful of stories to tell, isolated yelling at the sky at the claimed novelty and innovation of now, that you had witnessed decades earlier? Is it losing the sense of awe and gaining cynicism at the new ideas, though truly something on the verge of a revolution, a paradigm, but devolved into simply shouted louder and more persistent and more annoying? Or is it just being tired, tired all the time, tired to sleep, tired to think, tired to argue, tired to excite, to never truly be awake again?