There is a woman in her seventies who reads most mornings in a cafe down the road from us in Saigon. The same table, the same iced coffee, a book leaning against the sugar bowl. I’ve watched people her age come into that coffee shop looking worn out, and I’ve watched her sit there looking like she has nowhere else to be, and the difference has almost nothing to do with health or money.
One thing I’ve noticed about people who seem to age gracefully is that they don’t carry around as much. Somewhere along the line they put a few things away and never took them back.
Here are eight of them.
1. Does everyone like them
Most of us spend our thirties and forties quietly working to maintain our reputation. Smoothing things over, softening opinions, staying on good terms with people we don’t really like.
People in adulthood seem to understand that this was always impossible, and that the effort went into a bucket with a hole in it. They become kinder and less outgoing at the same time, which sounds counterintuitive until you meet someone who did. They will help you relocate and also tell you that your business idea is garbage.
2. By the looks of their age
Not a lecture about vanity. Everyone wants to look good, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice the gray hair.
But there’s a difference between taking care of yourself and a war you’re going to lose. At seventy, people who stopped looking at fifty look best. They dress well for their age, which reads like confidence, while the alternative always reads like effort.
3. Victory in the dispute
This is something I am still working on, so I say this with some humility.
At some point, people who age gracefully realize that being right costs surprisingly little, and that the cost of proving it is usually greater than the reward. They will say what they think once, clearly, and then let it sit. If you don’t agree, fine. They don’t need you to come.
My meditation teacher used to say 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 abandoned
An invitation that didn’t come. The group that went without them. The feeling that something is happening somewhere, and they are not in it.
Young people experience it all the time, and many people carry it well into old age, which is very unfortunate to watch. Graceful has come to terms with the fact that they can’t be everything and that most of what they lacked was, frankly, a bit average.
They usually prefer to be at home with a book anyway. Not as a consolation. As a real advantage.
5. Having something impressive to report
Ask many people what they have been doing and you will hear them looking for something good. A project, a trip, a bit of news that justifies the place they occupy in the conversation.
People who age gracefully stop listening. Ask them what they’ve been up to and you’ll get “a few, many chits” without a hint of apology. Being around is amazingly relaxing. You realize you don’t have to comply either.
6. Where should they be at the moment
There is a phantom schedule that most of us struggle against. Where we thought we would be in our forties, in our fifties, in our sixties. Which our old schoolmates seem to have succeeded.
I have 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. After you’ve been to a few funerals of people who looked like they had everything figured out, the scoreboard loses its credibility.
7. What their adult children turned out to be
This is the trickiest one on the list, and I’m not qualified to write about it yet, so take this as an observation rather than advice.
Parents I know in their sixties and seventies who seem calm have done the same thing. They recognized that their children are individuals who make their own choices, and stopped treating those choices as an assessment of their own upbringing. They stick together. They stay interested. They stop steering.
Those who can’t let go of the steering wheel age ten years faster, and relationships with children become thinner every year.
8. To be memorable
In middle age, many of us worry about our inheritance. Making a grade. To be the person that is mentioned after they are gone.
Sometime after sixty, those who get older seem to trade it in for something much smaller and much better. To be useful to the handful of people in front of them. A grandson who loves to come. A friend who knows to pick up the phone. They check the neighbor.
Buddhism looks at it from a different angle, and that’s the idea I’ve been sitting on the longest. The me you try so hard to keep was never as solid as you thought. What is longer than you is not your name. It’s how people felt in the room with you, and it’s created in ordinary Tuesdays, not monuments.
Pattern from below
Each of them raises concerns about how you are perceived. Loved, respected, envied, remembered, condemned in a fatherly manner, condemned against peers.
Aging gracefully looks like a slow release to my audience. Don’t become indifferent to people, because the people I describe are usually the warmest people I know. Just didn’t perform for them anymore.
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I’m not done with it. I still want to be right, still notice when I’m not invited, still find myself editing what I’ve got in mind before saying it out loud. But I’ve had enough conversations with people twenty and thirty years ahead to believe them when they say that most of it falls away, and that the falling away is the good part.
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