“Live hard, die young, have a good-lookin’ corpse every time.” _ Tom Waits (and countless other raconteurs).
There’s only one way to actually stay young, and that is to die young.
Morbid, I know, but true. Otherwise, aging is inevitable, but your attitude about the accumulation of years can keep you feeling young right into elderlyhood.
I just finished a book of essays by a writer who said, “Fuck you, fifty.” Though I’m still a few years away from that milestone, I don’t feel that way at all.
Heath Ledger. Amy Winehouse. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Billie Holiday. Natalie Wood. Adam Yauch. I bet all of them would have loved to have turned 50, to keep on celebrating birthdays.
Now I’m no fan of the weird sprouty chin hairs that have appeared during this fourth decade of life. I could do without the hormonal inconsistencies and crepey-looking skin (why do I keep squeezing it to make it look even crepier?!). The reading glasses are a drag. And I worry more about my parents now than ever before. But I believe there’s a richness to aging that we can’t know until we get there.
Especially if we consider getting older part of the adventure of life, which of course it is. It’s just that our culture doesn’t appreciate it much. Or, rather, at all. We live in a culture that would obliterate aging entirely, both through surgical interventions and “homes” that are essentially storage facilities for the elderly.
When my grandmother was suffering from dementia and living in a memory-care center, many of her fellow residents rarely had a visitor. Even I didn’t make it out there all that often, which I profoundly regret now but justified then with my busy schedule, etc., etc.
If you are over 30 — and I imagine you are, because you’re reading about how to stay young —you know firsthand that how you feel inside hasn’t changed all that much since you were a teen or young 20-something. You probably like a lot of the same stuff, just tempered now with a little maturity (some more than others). So why would it be any different when we reach 50, 60, 70, 80?
My friend R started doing triathlons at age 54. Triathlons! Now she’s 70, in impeccable health and still competing, often winning her age division. My mom, almost 73, has been a mountaineer for more than 30 years. Besides climbing peaks all over Europe, she also skied more than 100 days last winter. And then there’s “The Frenchy,” Jacques Huout, still mountain-biking and ski-racing well into his 80s. (If you haven’t seen the short documentary about him, treat yourself and be inspired.)
Even my Nana J — the one who went blind, not the one with dementia — continued to learn new things about herself into her elder years. In her 80s, before she lost her sight, she discovered a talent for watercolor painting. When she turned 92, I asked her, “Nana, do you feel 92?” She said, “No. I feel about 58.”
She lived to be 99, cracking herself up almost until the end.
I don’t mean to suggest that aging is a big picnic. As Tom Waits (also) says, “Getting older: it’s not for sissies.” (Case in point: I became a Tom Waits ain my late teens and still love him today.)
With life comes loss, and the longer we live, the more losses we’re likely to face. We lose loved ones. We may ultimately lose our vision or mobility or independence. But some of those losses can be delayed and all can be endured if we start treating ourselves with loving care now.
There’s no way to stay young without taking consummate care of our health, both physical and mental. That means exercising more days a week than not (even if it’s just walking), eating lots of vegetables (and not too much crap), getting enough sleep and consciously abating stress. Stress is a killer, and that’s no joke. It causes inflammation, which is implicated in every nasty disease and health concern none of us want.
Good anti-aging self care also requires having fun — doing things you like with people you like — and continuing to learn and challenge yourself, whether through triathlons, watercolors, or anything else that sounds interesting.
Most of all, though, it comes down to attitude. If we constantly think that our best years are behind us, surely that will be true. Yet if we treat the accumulation of years as a privilege not bestowed on everyone; a chance to learn more about ourselves and the world, to contribute, to discover, to try something new, aging can only be seen as a blessing — through reading glasses, of course.