Old age, the last stage of life, is solid and at the same time fragile. It is solid because the old people carry a treasure of knowledge and experience.

They are firm in their ideas and opinions. It is fragile because of the declining physical capacities. Typically, the old people are more affected by a feeling of being old than being physically old. The old people ______.

When you first examine something under a microscope, say a leaf from a plant, you’re amazed at how much detail there is and it’s a detail that you simply cannot see without magnification. And what you can see with the naked eye becomes suddenly huge under the lens. How big everything looks is astonishing but it’s also amazingly intricate. Suddenly it’s as if another world has opened up in front of your eyes and you think, hey, I hadn’t realized that something so small, so tiny, could be so ________.