How to Age Well

A doctor asked me to write about aging well. He said he wanted something to hand out to his aging patients. As one of those aging persons, I will be speaking to myself as much as anybody. I will use the term “aging” as an acronym:

A: Accept the fact that you are aging. Denying it will not help you meet and greet the fascinating changes sweeping across your life’s landscape. Older men and women trying to look like their youthful counterparts is both comical and sad. Elderly men don’t look any better in tank tops than elderly women do with a bare midriff. Act and dress age-appropriate.

Trust that as baby boomers age, aging will become more acceptable, if not fashionable.

Even though death will eventually win your sometimes painful wrestling match with aging, don’t give up too easily or early. As Dylan Thomas famously wrote his dying father: “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

G: Gradual is best. Take heart that aging is a slow process, made slower if you do the things you need to do to maintain whatever level of health you can. That means taking care of your body and soul, from eating right to exercising, getting sufficient sleep and rest, avoiding stress and learning to meditate.

I: Interests are important. You have to exercise your mind as well as your body. Research strongly suggests that maintaining and developing new interests keep your brain functioning better, longer.

I will never forget my great-aunt Dorothy. After she turned eighty, she began fading. She would spend her days in front of the television, dozing off and on. A once bright and dynamite businesswoman, she had lost her interest in living.

Then she chanced to meet Harry at a bingo game, the one thing she would still leave her house to enjoy. It was apparently love at first sight. Harry was five years younger than her, and smaller in frame. And from that initial meeting until her death ten years later, they were inseparable. Dorothy’s personality and passion for life rapidly returned, generated by her love interest. Never underrate the power of passion, and not just for persons, but also for causes or even hobbies.

N: Nurture yourself and others. Let others nurture you. I have known many elderly persons who wanted to maintain their independence, including refusing to let others do for them things that others wanted to do, and they needed to let them do. At the heart of aging well is permitting yourself to receive some of the fruit from your prior years of personal investment in others.

G: Graceful does it. The finest way to age is gracefully. To age gracefully means not to be ashamed of aging. The wisdom you attain is more important to others than you might think. I remember talking with an elderly gentleman who rightly felt he was the only one in his family who could go and talk with a grandson. He alone had the moral authority years of living wisely and well could beget. He and I discussed what he wanted to say and how best to say it.

He did talk to the wayward grandson, and apparently gained the desired outcome. His graceful way of presenting reality proved winsome.