Age, Appreciated

There are some things we learn because someone teaches us, and then there are the things we only learn by living long enough. Being right and being happy are not always on the same side. This is something life tends to teach us better than mere words ever could. The same is true of loss. We can understand intellectually that life changes and relationships change. We know that bodies change, people leave, plans fall apart.

I’m coming to learn that some truths do not become real until we have lived through them, and often more than once. By the time we are older, we know things that younger versions of ourselves simply could not have known yet. We now know that a terrible season can end, and that some endings are painful and still necessary. We know that people can and will disappoint us and still be worth loving. We know that the thing we were absolutely convinced would ruin our life sometimes becomes the very thing that changes it. I have repeatedly become grateful for these things because they have brought me the biggest rewards. Who would have figured?

I now know that being needed is not the same as being loved, and that staying busy is not anywhere near the same as having a meaningful life. We know that relationships rarely survive on good intentions alone. We know that bodies change whether we approve of it or not. We know that certainty is often temporary. We know that almost nothing stays exactly as it is. Things keep changing all around us all the time. And perhaps most importantly, we know that neither do we stay the same.

I have come to understand that this is one of the more subtle gifts of aging. Not the often touted wisdom in the grand, lofty sense. I am suspicious of the idea that simply getting older automatically makes anyone wise. I’ve met some truly unwise older adults. I’m now coming to learn that time gives us evidence. What a gift. We have lived through enough to know that feelings change, circumstances change, and people surprise us. We survive things we once thought we could not, and the power in that alone is life-changing. We sometimes recover from what looked irreparable. Sometimes we do not recover in the way we hoped, but we build a life around that loss anyway. We persist and we grow, and we are more than we were the day before. We survive. I am here to tell you that this is powerful, and that there is a particular kind of stability that comes from having seen life misbehave before.

We will, without a doubt, still worry, and we will still grieve. There will be days that you will still feel blindsided. Yet somewhere in you is the memory of other hard things, and you will remember that you have been here before, or somewhere close to here, and you’ll remember that you have had to begin again before. You have had to rethink what mattered before. You have lost certainty before. There are so many things we understand differently. With age, we become less interested in impressing people and more interested in being known by them. Less interested in having the last word, and much less willing to waste time on relationships that require us to abandon ourselves. I hear over and over that people are beginning to realize that they are less embarrassed about needing rest. They delight in it. So many of the people I work with tell me that they are increasingly less convinced that changing their mind meant they were wrong before. They suspect that sometimes it simply means they know more now. I believe this is worth remembering.

The truth is that people tend to look at aging through the lens of what is lost. They feel deprived of things like speed, stamina, appearance, roles, people, and certainty. Some losses are real, and I don’t think there’s any point in pretending otherwise. The good news is that there is also accumulation. I spend a good deal of my therapy practice time focusing on this. We can choose to look only for what has changed and the cost of those changes, or we can notice, and I mean really see, that we are gaining perspective. We can see patterns that had to be before us for years and years before they were remotely recognizable. We can better discern what passes and what lasts. I love knowing the difference because it so reliably guides me toward that which is most meaningful.

If we are lucky, we will develop a growing awareness that life is both more fragile and more durable than we once understood. I’m still constantly fascinated by this beautiful contradiction. Maybe that is one of the things age gives us. Not all the answers, but better questions, and the wise ability to recognize a few truths when we see them.