I heard a fairly normal comment about aging while on the tennis court last week. I had met a few new guys exactly my age – 68 and 69. One of them said “this being in my late 60s has not been that hard to admit but 69!!! Sheesh, that is almost 70, and whoa – that is old!” and he puckered his face with a reluctant not-so-accepting smile at the inevitable doom that awaited him.
The fact that this is a normal comment points to a problem.
I have already said it several times – aging is not a bed of roses, but it is not all dandelions and decline either. After many interviews, observations and research, it is clear that those who age with some grace and intention know how to look forward to aging and they know what to look for.
Here’s the most common conversational signal of how pervasive it is to view aging as a wasteland. I tell people I have a 19-year-old grandson and I hear quite often – and all of us have heard versions of this – from those who want to give me a huge compliment: “WHY, I THOUGHT YOU WERE TOO YOUNG TO HAVE A GRANDCHILD THAT AGE.” I do take it as a compliment. I am glad I have enough vitality to appear younger than some my age – perhaps I am. But what is the big deal about being, looking and acting our age? Do we not want people to know our gender, our race, our height, our ethnicity… are those good things to broadcast, but heaven forbid, not our age? Anything but that. (Our weight may be the other dreaded truth to conceal).
Trying to pass for younger is partially a comment on vitality, and a huge comment that acting and looking your age is somehow bad and to be avoided in this culture of ageism. (And I am aware that many people who need to work may indeed have to hide their age from their employer to avoid being “aged out” of a job. My silver-haired wife Patricia thinks if she was in corporate settings all the time like she used to be not long ago and still is some, her silver hair would be dark and tinted auburn like in the old days.)
One champion and provocateur in this arena is Ashton Applewhite. (TED Talk on Youtube) She labels our emotional aversion to getting older the “reflexive dread.” I think that is the perfect term, the clearest evidence of our collective disgust with aging, to the point that we take it as normal.
So, two things to do about this, if you want to consider an alternative.
Step number one in looking forward to aging’s upsides is to decide wrinkles are not the enemy. Gray hair is cool. Stop identifying who we are, and our worth, with our bodies’ youthfulness and with our careers’ usefulness. We can be proud of all we have done and how great we used to look, and how many marathons or ultras we could run at one time in our lives. But that is behind us now and we need to start accepting the gift of interiority; the “flowering of the spirit” is the way activist nun Joan Chittister puts it in The Gift of Years: “It is not the getting older that is difficult. It is the fear of getting older that plagues us. Instead of seeing a long life as a gateway to the flowering of the spirit, we are far more likely in a culture geared toward movement, beauty and achievement, to see it as the coming of a wasteland.”
So, we have some de-culturizing and de-middle-age biasing to do to get on with aging well. Like the black kids declaring: “I am black and I am proud” in the ’60s, we need to say “I am old and I am cool with it!!” (Thank you Maggie Kuhn and the Gray Panthers.)
Step number two is to look for something else in our make-up (that interiority, flowering of the spirit thing) that is getting better with aging. When I have raised that possibility – better with aging – to others, I often get this question along with a stumped look, “Well what could that possibly be?” To most of us, nothing significant that will improve with age comes to mind. We have 100% bought into the aging equals wasteland notion.
So how do you do step number two—looking for and finding that something else, those inner dimensions? Three words – do some reflection. Start reading some of the books listed on my website or the many good ones I don’t know about. If you are really stuck, or lazy, commit to reading every word of this blog series for the next 11 months. Subscribe. I will bring these inner dimensions to your inbox or device. This is my job for the year. As the church lady would say, all together now, with a little snark – How conveni-e-ent!!
Image: “Ancient Passageway” By A.Davey is licensed under CC BY 2.0