An Essential Guide to Aging Well

Older, Wiser

Katharine Bethell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367223854
• eBook ISBN: 9781000169157
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a refreshingly honest self-help guide to aging well. It encourages readers to dispel gloom or overcome denial around the subject of aging and offers advice in a realistic, non-prescriptive format.

Practical yet personable, chapters move through pertinent topics such as making the decision to retire and successfully navigating that transition; designing daily routines (your practice) and engaging in activities (your projects); connecting with others as relationships shift and evolve; and managing moods and emotional issues. The guide also supports readers coping with illness or injury, experiencing loss and grief, and those searching for meaning as they grow older.

Written in a conversational style, An Essential Guide to Aging Well motivates its readers to be curious about this time of life, and to design the best possible version of it for themselves.

1
The Republic of Let’s Not Go There

It’s an interesting phenomenon. Most of us, when we were children, couldn’t wait to grow up. Think of your four-year-old self, proudly displaying all five fingers on one hand when someone asked how old you were, only to have a parent remind you that your birthday was still a few weeks away. Now that we are full-grown adults, it’s the other way around. There are too many candles on that cake. We wish we were young—or at least younger.

Old age as a state of being is a bit like an unappealing foreign territory, a place you wouldn’t want to visit—the Republic of Let’s Not Go There. It’s true that somewhere along the way, usually in middle age, we have a glimpse of what it might be like to grow old, but it’s a partial glimpse shrouded in euphemism. There’s even a vocabulary designed to take the edge off what is happening. Senior citizens, golden agers, perennials, members of the elderhood—perhaps they are young-at-heart—are said to be living joyfully in their sunset years.

Some of us go to great lengths to avoid the fact of our mortality. Even if we’re fortunate and have good models for growing old—relatives, friends, mentors—we still persist, consciously or otherwise, in the belief that old age is something that happens to someone else. Developmentally, we are shielded from this reality for a lovely, long stretch from birth through the young adult years. But somewhere in the middle years, we begin to encounter the disconcerting possibility that we will not live forever.

Rather than experiencing an epiphany of consciousness, we tend to buffer ourselves against the truth of growing old with a variety of strategies. Simple avoidance and outright denial are favorites. Dubious humor—take a look at the birthday cards for folks over 50!—plays its part. Some of the markers along the way are physical, some are cognitive, and some are emotional. They are all signposts on a road that we would prefer not to travel, so we make fun of them or try to ignore them. Old age has been described as a slow, reluctant march into enemy territory. The image makes us nervous.

Still, I refer to “old age” deliberately. The phrase may prompt you to stop reading, but wait a moment. To name something is to make it real. To name something that is personal is to own it. When you make something explicit, you take it out of the realm of the repressed, the ambiguous, and the amorphous, and create a foundation on which to build something of value. So here’s the challenge: to overcome your denial, abandon the quest for the fountain of youth and accept the reality that you are growing old. Why? Because that’s the first step—claiming your oldness—to living well in your advancing years.

It’s curious how seniority in most situations or settings means the recognition of some sort of achievement worthy of respect, if not downright admiration. We honor our veterans. We designate our professors and pastors “emeritus.” But when it comes to claiming our advanced position in the life cycle, we’re ambivalent. Maybe we’re just reluctant, maybe downright resistant. The fact is, we’re becoming eligible for membership in a club we never wanted to join.

Many factors influence our ability to accept this new status. Some are personality traits such as our capacity for change, our flexibility or adaptability. As you would guess, health conditions are somewhat predictive, and personal finances play a major part. There’s also a family dimension that makes a difference in our openness or willingness to accept our advancing age with a little grace. The memories you hold of older relatives—the hardy grandfather who played catch with you into his 80s or the great-aunt who mailed you postcards from her travels to exotic places—are positive. Less so is the remembrance of an aging parent who struggled with a debilitating illness or a favorite uncle who became withdrawn and irritable. And it’s not only our experience with the older generation, but also the attitudes that were passed down. Any indication of respect for old age, tempered with tolerance for its accompanying quirks, counts for a lot in shaping our own attitudes.

It’s hard to quantify old age, although social scientists and others try to put brackets around it, even labeling a subset the “oldest old.” You’ve heard the joke that old age is ten years older than you are now. Or that 60 is the new 50, and so on. I was amused to hear someone describe today’s “new old age” as the years between feeling fine and being dead. Whether academic or entertaining, these efforts to define old age miss the point. What matters more is your self-awareness, grounded in your experience and enhanced by your insights.

Before you bravely lay claim to the title of old person, let’s explore what that means. Then we’ll take a look at the clues that you may be eligible. And if you’re motivated—you’ve accepted your status and begun to adapt—we’ll consider various ways to make the best of it. I’m not saying it’s always fun. But you can prevail. You can be older and wiser.

2
What Does It Mean?

Mortality. That dreary word itself is enough to dampen our spirits. Yet a failure to claim—let alone embrace—our mortality has the obvious consequence that we are unprepared for the inevitable. No chance to express what we meant to communicate to people we love, no wrapping up of affairs, no final visits to scenes of our youth or even our middle age. Ironically, to acknowledge that this life has an ending is to open up opportunities—beginnings, in a sense—to live as fully as possible in the time available.

If we’re immortal, time is eternal. What’s the hurry? Why take risks, try something new, reach out to another person, when there is all the time in the world? Why focus on the quality of life in your last decades, when the decades roll on forever?

But when you think about it, how can you take something seriously if you pretend it’s not happening? That’s the problem with denial.

If we accept that our stay on the planet is finite, that the supply of time allotted to us is not endlessly renewable, we become motivated to use that time differently. We’re already familiar with this phenomenon of deadlines. When our mother said she was going to count to three before losing it, we put our Legos away—fast. When the term paper was due in 24 hours, we wrote furiously. When the boss issued a new drop-dead date for our project, we hustled and delivered. We know how to focus, when it matters.

If we can’t be sure how many years we have left, we can choose to use that time wisely. Selectively. No point squandering it on things or people or activities that don’t really matter to us. We may also come to appreciate the mere existence of time, knowing that it’s not forever. Something to ponder the next time you’re stuck in traffic. Can you breathe deeply and be grateful that you are still here on this earth? Even in a backup lasting three lights? No? Give it a try.

You will also discover that time passes more quickly as you grow older. Time acceleration ramps up slowly across the life cycle but really picks up momentum in old age. Do you remember how it once seemed forever to wait for holidays to come around? Now, like birthdays, they reappear with startling frequency. As children, we knew very well the feeling of longing for something to happen, whether it was merely recess or—better yet—the end of the school year. Now that sense of anticipation is abbreviated. On the one hand, we feel the loss of possibility as the clock ticks faster. It’s an unwelcome development. On the other hand, what a curious effect this speeding-up can have when the days and weeks no longer stretch before us in such a seemingly endless progression. Life is on fast forward. That’s not all bad, if you find that it motivates you to use time wisely.

There’s a corollary to this time warp. A much older friend once remarked to my younger self, “You know, aging is a time of rapid change.” At the time, I was mystified. In my view, there was nothing amped up about getting older. It looked like reaching a plateau of some sort, flat and rather dull. But she was mostly right about the change part. Better to think of it as strong currents in a river, with occasional rapids to navigate.

What’s Ahead

Much of the change that accompanies aging is physical—outright aches and pains, mysterious twinges, morning stiffness that lasts all day. Much is related to mind and memory—elusive words, forgotten names, misplaced reading glasses. At the very least, we find ourselves disconcerted by these alterations and disruptions to our previously taken-for-granted level of functioning in the world. At our best, we find ways to compensate for diminished stamina or the arrival of the hated, feared senior moment. Some of the adaptation is behavioral—learning to operate within certain physical limitations. Some of the adaptation is cognitive: writing things down instead of committing them to your increasingly faulty memory, coming up with some kind of gimmick to remember the name of the person you met five minutes ago.

The challenge in either category is to revise our long-standing and trusted organizing principles for getting through life, in order to keep on keeping on. I refer to principles as though they were well-defined and explicit, a nice orderly set of guidelines. Actually, during your younger years they were such semi-automatic and habitual patterns of acting and thinking that they required little or no effort on your part. But as you grow older, you’ll probably want to make your organizing principles more conscious and deliberate. You may need to gauge the distance from parking place to store entrance before you shop. You may need to design a new ritual to ensure that all the burners on the stove are turned to off before you leave home. You may need to ask your new acquaintance to repeat her name and then pair it with some obvious or fanciful image in your mind. That’s helpful—some of the time.

If you take a good look at those long-standing principles that have brought you this far, they were probably, to some degree, performance-oriented. Now the determination to do well at whatever you did through much of life is loosening its hold. Of course, people vary, with some hell-bent on excelling and beating out the competition from the fourth grade forward, scoring the most runs on the tee-ball team, winning the essay contest, or landing a seat on the City Council. Others made their peace with this pressure somewhere along the way. But the prevailing emphasis in the younger years is apt to be on comparing yourself to others, and wanting to come out on top. In contrast, one definition of the meaning of old age is this: you get to be yourself. You’re less concerned with how others perceive you, more intent on living your own life. It’s a departure from youthful insecurities and middle-age uncertainties. Older people can’t necessarily tell you when or how they arrived at this point—but it’s a good place to be.

In addition to the freedom associated with caring less about others’ opinions, old age can mean more free time and fewer obligations. Even with commitments, you may not have to go all in, as you did when you were younger. You can take a break from that volunteer job, or switch one for another. There are trade-offs, to be sure, as your significant others, family members, and dear friends grow older right along with you. They come equipped with their own age-related issues and the need for your support and assistance. It’s a balancing act, caring for others and caring for yourself.

A Touch of Technophobia

The world isn’t standing still while you slowly come to terms with your aging process. If you were an early adopter of technological advances, you can relax. You are completely at home on the internet. You understand the cloud, you have more than a dozen apps on your smartphone, and maybe you text with two thumbs. But if you came of age before the revolution, it’s not necessarily easy to adapt. As you grow older, the gulf between your analog self and the digital world grows ever wider.

Some claim their oldness as a matter of pride, insisting on books that have hard covers and resisting all invitations to join social media. Their resistance to technology is their way of honoring the way the life used to be, the one they know so well. Just as often, it’s driven by a fear of the unfamiliar, the kind of anticipatory anxiety that goes with learning something new. The trade-off, of course, is the opportunity to upgrade your personal operating style and increase your pleasure in life. We’ll look into making this a project in Chapter 9.

Some Gender Differences

In previous generations, the fact of being male or female may have made a more significant difference in the process of adaptation to advancing age. The old stereotype was of a man suddenly faced with the need to pursue new activities—and find a new identity—after he retired from many years absorbed in his work. As women edge toward greater equality in the workplace—and greater job satisfaction—they may face a similar quandary of how to channel their energy post-retirement. But an older woman is apt to have years of experience with multi-tasking and juggling various roles. However committed she may have been to the work she did, her identification with it may have been somewhat less singular than that of her male counterpart. She may have already developed a menu of interests to pursue as she grows older.

Women may have an advantage over men in their ability to anticipate alterations in their bodies as they age. Men and women share in the surprises of puberty, but the female life cycle involves monthly reminders of this maturation until a woman reaches menopause, which offers more evidence that aging is underway. If she chooses to reproduce, she experiences even more physical transitions. For some women, these years of conscious awareness and attention to the body—how it works—helps to ease the adaptation to aging and make it more tolerable, less shocking. The inevitable alterations in appearance are more difficult for many women to accept, as they fear their perceived loss of attractiveness and change of status in the biological mating dance.

As our society places more emphasis on the fluidity of gender roles—and even accepts the possibility of gender transformation—the once-traditional images and expectations of men and women in old age will continue to evolve.

Similar Experiences

Male or female, what else is likely to occur? The meaning that you assign to all manner of things is up for review. As noted, advancing age can influence your perception of other people’s behavior and your reaction to it. Life’s slings and arrows may still be aimed in your direction, but you can choose to take them less personally or just dodge out of the way. Once upon a time, a rude remark by a neighbor might have had you brooding for days. Now you may be able to chalk it up to bad manners and shrug it off. Your attitude may become more benevolent; you may forgive more easily.

You may also become more sentimental, more easily touched emotionally. Memories of the past or kindnesses in the present bring tears to your eyes more readily than ever. The same holds true for the utterly predictable ending of a movie, the wedding of people you don’t even know very well, the first few bars of the nat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• 1 The Republic of Let’s Not Go There
• 2 What Does It Mean?
• 3 How Did This Happen?
• 4 The Rear View Mirror
• 5 The Selfie
• 6 You and Your Role Models
• 7 Decisions: Taking Control, and Letting Go
• 8 Working. Or Not.
• 9 Your Practice, Your Projects
• 10 Moving. Or Not.
• 11 Lighten Up
• 12 Do Less. Be More.
• 13 Warranty Expiring
• 14 Stormy Weather
• 15 You and Your Constant Companion
• 16 The Significance of Others
• 17 Loves Lost
• 18 When It All Falls Apart
• 19 The View From Here
• Appendix I: Creating A Personal Timeline
• Appendix II: Retirement: Making It Happen
• Appendix III: Talking With Each Other
• Bibliography