Signs of Life

Andy Rooney said, “It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.”

I keep coming back to this quote because he had a point. Most of us want long lives. We want more birthdays, more Christmas mornings, more dinners with people we love, more trips, more ordinary Tuesdays, and personally, I always want more chances to see what happens next. We want the years, but we seem to have a much more complicated relationship with looking like we have lived them.

We celebrate longevity while simultaneously trying to disguise nearly every visible sign of it. This takes such effort, doesn’t it? We admire someone who lives to 95, yet somewhere along the way, growing older became something we were supposed to resist, correct, soften, hide, or apologize for. When I think about it, that is a strange bargain.

Of course, some of our reluctance makes perfect sense. Getting older can bring losses we would never choose. So many things change. Our bodies, our roles, our daily schedule. People we love die. Certain things become harder, and there is nothing particularly helpful about pretending otherwise. But I wonder how often our fear of aging is about aging itself, and how often it is about what we have been taught aging means.

For years, often decades, we absorb the message that getting older means becoming less interesting, less attractive, less capable, less relevant, somehow less ourselves. We are diminished just thinking about these things. And the more often we hear those messages, the easier it becomes to mistake them for truth. Those messages are everywhere, and after hearing them long enough, it is remarkably easy to start repeating them in our own heads without even noticing that we are doing it. I thoroughly believe that this is the part worth challenging.

Growing older is not something that happens after life. It is life. The wrinkles, the changing body, the accumulated stories, the people we have loved, the mistakes we would not make again (and the ones we would), the things we finally understand, the things we have stopped caring about, and the things we care about more deeply than ever before are all part of the same package.

We cannot ask for another twenty years and then resent the fact that twenty years have passed, or begrudge the changes those years have brought with them.

I’ve decided the goal is not to convince ourselves that we love every part of aging. I certainly do not think we have to. Aging can be difficult, inconvenient, humbling, and at times heartbreaking. But perhaps we could stop treating it as the price we pay for getting to live longer.

It is the living longer.

Here comes the assignment I often suggest in these writings: this week, when you catch yourself thinking negatively about your age, stop for a moment. Not to correct yourself with a cheerful affirmation you do not believe, but simply to get curious. Ask yourself: Is this something I actually believe about growing older, or is it something I learned to believe?

Then ask yourself one more question: What have these years given me that I would not willingly give back?

I suspect that answer will have several layers. Some may be obvious, while others may surprise you when you stop long enough to consider them. Your answer may be the more important one.

We spend a great deal of time wishing for more time. Perhaps part of aging well is learning how to welcome the evidence that we got it.

Because there really is no way to have the gift of more years without being changed by them. More years mean more of life itself: more people to love, more things to learn, more chances to begin again, more ordinary days we never could have had otherwise. We may not love everything the years bring, but the ultimate payoff is that we were here for them.

And I feel certain that Andy Rooney would believe that is worth looking older for.