There is a woman in her seventies in Saigon who spends most mornings reading in a cafe near our house. Same table, same iced coffee, book leaning against the sugar bowl. I’ve seen people her age come to that cafe looking exhausted, and I’ve seen her sit there looking like she has nowhere to go, a difference that has almost nothing to do with health or money.
I’ve noticed that people who seem to be aging gracefully actually don’t have much behind them. They dropped something somewhere and never picked it up again.
Here are eight of them.
1.Does everyone like it?
Most of us spend our thirties and forties quietly protecting our reputations. To soften things up, soften opinions, maintain good relations with people we don’t actually like.
Older people seem to find that this is always impossible and that all efforts fall into a bucket with a hole in it. They simultaneously become more friendly and less accommodating, which sounds contradictory until you meet someone who does this. They’ll help you move, and they’ll tell you your business idea is garbage.
2. Look at age
Not a lecture on vanity. Everyone likes to look presentable and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice the appearance of gray.
But there’s a difference between taking care of yourself and fighting a war you’ll lose. The people who look their best at seventy are usually the ones who stop trying to look fifty. They wear age-appropriate clothing, which is interpreted as confidence, whereas the alternative is always interpreted as effort.
3. Win the argument
I’m still working on this, so I say that with all humility.
At some point, those who age gracefully realize that the value of being right is surprisingly minimal, and that the cost of being right often outweighs the reward. They speak their mind clearly and leave it there. If you disagree, fine. They don’t need you to come over.
My meditation teacher once said that most arguments are two people defending a version of themselves. It took me about ten years to understand what he meant.
4. to be excluded
No invitation to come. That group of people without them. It feels like something is happening somewhere and they are not part of it.
It’s a painful thing that young people feel constantly and many people carry with them into old age. Elegant people have accepted the fact that they can’t be everything, and honestly, most of what they’re missing is mediocre.
In any case, they usually prefer to go home with a book. Not as comfort. as a true preference.
5. Have something impressive to report
Ask a lot of people what they’re doing lately and you can hear them looking for something that sounds good. A project, a trip, some news justifies the space they occupy in the conversation.
People who age gracefully no longer audition. Ask them what they’ve been up to lately and you’ll get “not much, reading a lot,” without any apology. There was a strange relaxing feeling around me. You realize you don’t have to perform either.
6. Where should they be now?
Most of us are resisting a virtual schedule. We think we will be forty, fifty, sixty. Our old classmates seem to have done it.
I noticed that those who looked the lightest had quietly stopped comparing. Not through some big philosophical breakthrough, mostly through fatigue and the observation that everyone’s life looks better on the outside. Once you’ve been to a few funerals where everyone’s funerals look like they’ve been arranged, the scoreboard loses its authority.
7. How are their adult children doing?
This is the hardest one on the list, and I’m not yet qualified to write it, so treat it as an observation rather than a suggestion.
All the parents I know who seem peaceful in their sixties and seventies have done the same thing. They have accepted that their children are independent people making their own choices, and they no longer see those choices as a mark against their own parenting. They stay in close contact. They stay interested. They stopped driving.
People who can’t let go of the wheel seem to age by about a decade, and their relationships with their children get weaker every year.
8. Be remembered
In midlife, many of us experience legacies anxieties. Make a mark. The kind of person who will be talked about long after they’re gone.
After sixty, those who age seem to trade it in for smaller, better things. Useful to the few in front of them. A grandson who loves to come over. A friend who knows they will answer the phone. A neighbor they checked on.
Buddhism looks at this from a different angle, and it was an idea that took me the longest to come to terms with. The self you so desperately want to preserve is never as strong as you think. It is not your name that outlives you. That’s how people felt in the room, and this was established on a regular Tuesday rather than in a monument.
pattern below
Each of these is a concern about how others view you. To be liked, to be respected, to be envied, to be remembered, to be judged as a parent, to be judged by peers.
To me, aging gracefully is like a slow release for the audience. Don’t get careless with people, because the people I describe are often some of the warmest people I know. Just no longer performing for them.
I’m not done with this yet. I still want to be right, still notice that I’m not invited, still find myself editing things I do before saying them out loud. But I’ve had enough conversations with people who were twenty, thirty years ahead of me that I believe them when they say that most of it is gone, and that disappearing is the good part.
Do you like my article? Like me on Facebook to see more articles like this in your feed.
