The Art of Aging Joyfully
The flight from Washington's Dulles Airport to Charlottesville, Virginia requires a scant 17 minutes, yet it was enough time for reflection. I just turned 74. Mindful that my father died at 77 and my brother at 75, I've wondered, no doubt too much, if genetics is sending me a message, written on my telomeres, that is soon to be read into my life.
I've thought about this before, of course. As a psychologist once playfully told me, "you have
"too much gray matter." I've thought about Dylan Thomas and wondered whether I should "go gentle into that good night" or "rage, rage against the dying of the light." I'm just not into raging (or going gently, either). I've thought about George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, who at 77 put a bullet through his heart, leaving behind a note that said, simply, "my work is over, why wait?" Yet that seems both ungrateful and terrifying (I decided against medical school because I have trouble with blood, especially my own.) I've thought, as well, about those who muster science (and pseudoscience) to erect barriers against the tide of aging, through useless drugs or over-hyped “cures.” Yet this seems tedious as well as expensive.
Looking around the small commuter jet that was ferrying us home, I was struck by how others were spending their time while I was ponderously contemplating my fate-to-be. One man was doing a crossword on his iPhone. Others were silently reading or engaged in quiet conversation. Some were seemingly just catching a short nap. And then there was the person sitting next to me, my wife of nearly 53 years. She was taking photo after photo of the sunset, with a passion and excitement that truly deserves the label "joy." In the way that has enthralled me since our dating days, she is as full of life - and thankful for it - as she has always been.
She is the antithesis to both Dylan Thomas and George Eastman. She will have none of that obsession with holding off aging through medical promises. She will not waste any of the 17 minutes of that flight. She'd rather spend it in awe of the beauty outside the too-dirty airplane window, not caring that its cataract-like film might leave a ghostly image on her digital photos. There was no barrier that mattered between her and what nature offered, and that of course is what makes her who she is. Nor, when she got home, would she slide off in slumber until she had loaded those photos on the computer, reveled in them once again, and sent some to her loved ones.
Her photography is not her primary passion. That label more properly goes to living. She is as joyful immersed in a novel or sipping a cup of peppermint chocolate tea. She is as entranced with a hummingbird's wings as she has been making funny sounds while reading to a series of grandchildren, enjoying the story as much as they have. Her eyes light up as she talks with loved ones, enjoying their stories, and her smile and excitement speak words of thankfulness and wonder. She laughs at old episodes of "I Love Lucy," though she has seen them and laughed just as much five times before. She collects DVDs, stuffed animals, music boxes, and paintings and enjoys each as if it was the very first one she ever got. While she has no doctorate from the advanced study of a minor subset of knowledge, as I do, she has mastered the art of living a full life, as I have not.
I think I knew this about her when I fell in love with her. She was, and remains, the elixir of the life that I crave, the muse for my own efforts to learn how to live. I will never achieve her ability for aging joyfully, but I will always be grateful that she shows me how. For nothing holds off what the years ultimately bring, but how we spend those advancing years is a choice that all of us get to make.
Photo Credit: Carol Donsky Newell
