There is a woman in her seventies who reads most mornings in a cafe across from us in Saigon. The same table, the same iced coffee, the book leaning against the sugar bowl. I’ve seen people his age arrive at the cafe in tatters, and I’ve seen him sit there looking like he’s nowhere else, and the difference has almost nothing to do with health or money.
What I’ve noticed about people who seem to age gracefully is that they don’t carry as much. Somewhere along the line some things were put down and never picked up again.
Here are eight of them.
1. Whether everyone loves them
Most of us spend our thirties and forties doing quiet maintenance work for our reputation. Smoothing things over, toning down opinions, staying on good terms with people we don’t really like.
Well aged people seem to have realized that this was always impossible and the effort goes into a holey bucket. They become kinder and less accommodating at the same time, which sounds counterintuitive until you meet someone who has. They will help you move and also tell you that your business idea is rubbish.
2. Looking at their age
Not a show about vanity. Everyone likes to look fair and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice the gray color.
But there’s a difference between taking care of yourself and fighting a war you’re losing. People who have stopped looking fifty tend to look their best at seventy. They dress well for their age, which is confidence, while the alternative is always effort.
3. Winning the argument
I’m still working on it, so I say it with some humility.
People who age gracefully at some point realize that being right costs surprisingly little, and proving it is usually higher than the prize. Once they clearly say what they think, then they let it sit there. If you don’t agree, fine. They don’t need you to come.
My meditation teacher used to say that most arguments are between two people defending a version of themselves. It took me about a decade to understand what he meant.
4. Omission
The invitation that didn’t come. The group that went without them. The feeling that something is happening somewhere and they are not involved.
Younger people feel it all the time, and many carry it into their old age, which is pitiful to watch. Graceful have come to terms with the fact that they can’t be everything, and most of what they lack is, frankly, a bit average.
They would usually prefer to be at home with a book anyway. Not as a consolation. As a real preference.
5. Have something compelling to report
Ask many people what they’ve done for a living and you’ll hear that they’re looking for something that sounds good. A project, a trip, a bit of news that justifies the space occupied in the conversation.
People who age gracefully stop listening. Ask them what they’ve been up to and you’ll get “not much, I read a lot” without a hint of apology. It’s strangely relaxing to be around. You realize you don’t have to perform either.
6. Where should they be now?
There is a phantom schedule that most of us struggle with. Where we thought we would be forty, fifty, sixty years old. Which our old schoolmates seem to have succeeded.
I’ve noticed that the people who seem the easiest have quietly stopped comparing. Not through some great philosophical breakthrough, mostly just through fatigue and the observation that everyone’s life looks better from the outside. Once you’ve attended the funerals of a few people who looked like the one who directed it, the leaderboard loses its authority.
7. How their adult children turned out
This is the hardest on the list and I’m not in a position to write about it yet, so take it as an observation rather than advice.
The parents I know in their sixties and seventies who seem peaceful have all done the same. They accepted that their children were separate people who made their own decisions and no longer treated those decisions as a grade on their own parenting. They stay close. They remain interested. They stop governing.
Those who can’t let go of the steering wheel seem to age ten years faster and their relationship with their children deteriorates every year.
8. To remember
There is a period in mid-life when many of us worry about inheritance. To make a sign. The kind of person who is remembered long after he is gone.
Somewhere over the age of sixty, the well-aged seem to trade it in for something much smaller and much better. Being useful to the handful of people in front of them. A grandson who likes to come over. A friend who knows the phone will be answered. A neighbor to be checked.
Buddhism approaches this from a different angle, and it’s the idea I’ve sat with the longest. The self you so desperately want to preserve was never as solid as you thought. What survives is not your name. That’s how people felt in the room with you, and it’s built on casual Tuesdays, not memorials.
The pattern is below
All of these are concerns about how you are perceived. He was liked, respected, envied, remembered, judged as a parent, judged against his peers.
Aging gracefully seems to me to be a slow release of the audience. I won’t be sloppy with people because the people I describe are usually the warmest people I know. He just doesn’t perform for them anymore.
I’m nowhere near done with this. I still wish I was right, I still notice when I haven’t been invited, I still find myself editing what I’ve done before I say it out loud. But I’ve had enough conversations with people in their 20s and 30s to believe them when they say that most fall and the fall is the good part.
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