The document discusses how aging can provide a sense of powerlessness but also wisdom. Some key points:
- Older age teaches that problems often resolve themselves without one's control or input, as misunderstandings settle over time through the resiliency of relationships.
- With age comes acceptance of one's limitations and less energy spent trying to control outcomes, instead trusting that "life tilts towards the good."
- Seeing miracles is a choice - one can see life as ordinary or recognize the extraordinary in both grand and small moments, like nature, love, and the fact of one's own existence. Aging allows more time and intention for such perspectives.
The document discusses how aging can provide a sense of powerlessness but also wisdom. Some key points:
- Older age teaches that problems often resolve themselves without one's control or input, as misunderstandings settle over time through the resiliency of relationships.
- With age comes acceptance of one's limitations and less energy spent trying to control outcomes, instead trusting that "life tilts towards the good."
- Seeing miracles is a choice - one can see life as ordinary or recognize the extraordinary in both grand and small moments, like nature, love, and the fact of one's own existence. Aging allows more time and intention for such perspectives.
The document discusses how aging can provide a sense of powerlessness but also wisdom. Some key points:
- Older age teaches that problems often resolve themselves without one's control or input, as misunderstandings settle over time through the resiliency of relationships.
- With age comes acceptance of one's limitations and less energy spent trying to control outcomes, instead trusting that "life tilts towards the good."
- Seeing miracles is a choice - one can see life as ordinary or recognize the extraordinary in both grand and small moments, like nature, love, and the fact of one's own existence. Aging allows more time and intention for such perspectives.
The document discusses how aging can provide a sense of powerlessness but also wisdom. Some key points:
- Older age teaches that problems often resolve themselves without one's control or input, as misunderstandings settle over time through the resiliency of relationships.
- With age comes acceptance of one's limitations and less energy spent trying to control outcomes, instead trusting that "life tilts towards the good."
- Seeing miracles is a choice - one can see life as ordinary or recognize the extraordinary in both grand and small moments, like nature, love, and the fact of one's own existence. Aging allows more time and intention for such perspectives.
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Opinion
A superpower of older age:
Powerlessness Anne Lamott
February 14, 2024
I woke up yesterday without too much going on except a cold and
cough I’ve had for two weeks, and of course the whole world coming apart like a two-dollar watch. Also, beauty everywhere: clouds descended from the ridge into folds in the hills like puffs and swoops of light gray smoke. I went to wash my face with my glasses still on, and felt like I was in a carwash. For a minute, I believed I had a detached retina — I’ve had a floater for two years, and my ophthalmologist has told me to be on the lookout for changes in vision. I got things sorted and took my morning meds, but then five minutes later was not positive that I had indeed taken them or just meant to. I caught up on all the ghastly news and then as a counterpoint sat down on the floor to play with the cat. Quiet joy and peace. Then, ring ring ring. It was a great old friend from childhood calling to say he was hurt by something I’d done. He insisted I had dissed him to an unnamed friend. I expressed how terrible I felt that this had hurt him, and that it was a dumb misunderstanding, and how much I loved him, and asked if we could get together to talk it through, but he said no, he wasn’t ready. I was stunned. I sat there awhile, partly to think about how to win him back and get him to forgive me but also because to get up from being seated on the floor, I need either a hand or some furniture to lean on, and found neither. I started to do a sowbug, roly-poly move that I’ve developed, where I roll to my side and push up off the ground, but instead I lay there, sad aged old misunderstood sowbug me. My reflex was to mount a defense. My Jesuit friend Tom Weston once said that he never noticed he was angry, just that he was right, and I acknowledged to my husband that I was both. He shrugged, smiling: Yep. Then I looked at my part in it and, yes, I could see why my friend felt as he did, and shame flickered. But I hadn’t wronged him. Any loved one’s anger at me feels life-threatening at first. I waited for him to call and straighten things out, but he didn’t. After a while, I rolled awkwardly to my feet like a ton of bricks, went to the kitchen and was eating my body weight in cheese when something suddenly came to me. It was a dawning realization that this problem was, with a little time, going to sort itself out. I almost smote my forehead. Yo! That had not occurred to me. It was going to be okay. I actually smiled. This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle. Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end? But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone. This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” So I got on with the day, trusting again that, as my husband says, life tilts towards the good. Rain clouds were gathering, stage left, and a wind began to blow, so I pulled on a thick turtleneck sweater, forgetting to first take off my glasses, which caught in the fabric, trapped me and stabbed me in the eye. (Come to think of it, maybe I am fine and the glasses are the problem.) I have a number of close friends in their 80s whom I see regularly, some of them quite infirm. On bad days, they say angrily that old age sucks. This is part of the package. We stick together. Ram Dass said that ultimately we are all just walking each other home. It began to pour, and the branches of the bigger trees whipped and bowed and the more delicate ones moved their arms gently, port de bras. I waited some more for the friend who’d called to come crawling back to me in a phone call or text. I grew increasingly uptight. Grappling with big life stuff can be too much, so I looked around at my little plot where heart and soul live, and tended to that: tea and clean sheets on the bed. After decades of the bashing, crashing, moaning and groaning, one gets too tired to keep doing this. I was tired. I released my friend to his own process. When you’re young and vigorous, convinced you are powerful, you have the energy to try to self- will your problems into submission, and it usually makes them worse. By 60 or so, you’ve had enough of participating in the Punch and Judy show of trying to get things to turn out the way you’re positive they should. You’ve learned to surrender. Otherwise, you’ll always be pissed off and exhausted, and that’s no way to live out whatever years you have left. By dusk, I was less pissed off and exhausted. The rain had stopped. There has been no word from my friend, but I assume there will be, in the fullness of time. But what were the options? I sat back down on the floor with the cat, my home-care nurse. The milky sky was pulling itself down over the ridge like a theatrical scrim, a play of cloud and hillside intermingling. There was a feeling of stasis in the weather — enough with the rain, it seemed to say; let’s all stay quiet and steady, which reflected exactly how I felt. Projection perhaps but, at any rate, I sowbugged my way with a certain goofy grace to a standing position, then all but raised my arms in triumph, a gymnast after a decent landing.
Opinion Age makes the miracles
easier to see Anne Lamott
January 17, 2024
Every so often, even in heartbreaking times, the soul hears something so true out of the corner of its ear that it perks up, looking around like a meerkat for the source. Mine did this when, decades ago, I read a quote of Albert Einstein’s: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” There are the obvious miracles all around us — love, nature, music, art. We drunks who somehow got sober call this the central miracle of our lives. Some of you have children you were told you couldn’t have. Some of you were sent home to die, years ago. And have you ever seen a grain of sand under a high-powered microscope? It looks like a jewelry store. But what do we do with the seemingly unmiraculous? For instance, former president Donald Trump is a bit of a stretch for me. How do we see the miracle in the madness of the months since Jan. 6, 2021? Well, we saw that democracy held. It might have gone either way. We here in the colonies rejoiced, in our quiet and fretful ways. My spirits are regularly flattened by the hardships of the world, of our country and of the people I love, so I find myself turning to the saints: Molly Ivins, for example. Decades ago, she said, “Freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.” When I heard her say this at a benefit for the ACLU, my soul leaped up off its chair. I spend a lot of time looking out the window. Age has given me this time and intention. I didn’t have so much of either when I was younger. My brain went much faster. There was so much to do, so much need and striving, and I had my trusty clipboard. Now I study the coral-colored abutilon buds right outside our window, little cups that hold the rainwater. Hummingbirds swing by all day to drink, and so it is a treat both for the eyes and for the spirit, for the bird and for the flower. One of the blessings of age is that most of us get along with ourselves better than when we were young. It is stunning to accept yourself: I am always going to have a womanly butt and now I appreciate it: It’s a nice seat cushion. When my son was young, I hired a teenage girl to help around the house and one day she was folding laundry. She held up a pair of the nice roomy underwear I prefer and said, with wonder, “Do they even make bigger underwear?” That was 25 years and 10 pounds ago — and yes, honey, they do. I’ll show you where to buy them someday. It’s a miracle that Earth exists at all, let alone is populated by humans who came up with antibiotics and Oreos, let alone Scandinavian detective shows. I love this joint a lot of the time. Even our modest local mountain looks majestic to me. Just today I saw beautiful slants of ground near the base that appeared lighter than the main portion, below the fog. They looked as if an artist chiseled them out of the rock, like doors. They said, “Come on over. We will let you in.” That is how I got sober in 1986: People said, “Come on over. We will let you in.” Today the moist sky looked like the inside of an abalone shell. That we are no one else but our very own selves is a miracle. About one hundred million sperm were released each time your parents made love, and one dogged little guy made you into exactly you, the exact being who woke up again today. Our eyes open, our ears open and, if they don’t work that well, we have devices to help them hear better. Our hearts are beating. Our lungs are bellowing in and out, our diaphragms rising. The muscles release and contract and get us up again. Sometimes we need others to help us. Both are amazing, the strength to rise or the loving help. One of the hardest aspects of getting old is that time races by like a slot car. I guess everything speeds up when it’s going downhill but still, it’s unnerving. On my grandson’s ninth birthday, I said jovially, “I thought you were six or something.” He said, “I live here! How can you think I’m six?” Then he rolled his eyes and patted me gently. Poor darling Nana. Age has helped most of us care less about our outsides. Of course, I wish we had known about sunscreen in the ’60s out here underneath the California sun. My inside person is of no particular age and finds the person in the mirror confusing, a computerized version of what young adorable me will look like as an older person. So twice a year I go to Sephora and announce that I’d like to buy a miracle, and wonderfully, they always have the exact right thing. I use it for a month, and then I put it in the bottom drawer with the other miracles. The miracle brain pills are in a different drawer, with the kerchiefs. Friends swear they work, but nope, a month later my mind is still perforated like a pie crust poked with a fork and memory slowly leaks out. So into the drawer they go while I walk around the house trying to remember what I was trying to remember. I like to think that they have organized a nice book club for the kerchiefs and the other bottles of brain pills. I can still walk the flatter trails of our mountain, where the streams have begun to fill with rainwater, though not enough to actually flow yet. The peace of nature wears down the fear and hatred that arise in me on bad days, until I remember at some point that all we can do is the next right thing. I often remind myself of something the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said that helps me focus: “Don’t let them get you to hate them.” When they do, I lose me, I lose my center and my goodness, which will be needed for the hard work ahead of being older and saving democracy. There’s an incredible reflective herringbone design in the stream of rock and shadow and rock and shadow. I breathe in the cool air. My soul settles.
Opinion
It’s good to remember: We are all
on borrowed time Anne Lamott Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. Her latest book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” will be published in April 2024.
October 30, 2023
Getting older is almost like changing species, from cute middle-aged,
white-tailed deer, to yak. We are both grass eaters, but that’s about the only similarity. At the Safeway sushi bar during lunchtime, I look at the teenage girls in their crop tops with their stupid flat tummies and I feel bad about what lies beneath my big, forgiving shirts but — and this is one of the blessings of aging — not for long. Aging has brought a modicum of self-compassion, and acceptance of what my husband and I call “the Sitch”: the bodily and cognitive decline that we all face sooner or later. Still, at Safeway, I can’t help but avert my eyes. Why push my luck? Twenty years ago, when I turned 50, I showed the dark age spots on my arms and the backs of my hands to my wonderful dermatologist. “They used to call these liver spots,” I said, laughing. There was silence. “They still call them liver spots,” he replied. My mother died of Alzheimer’s disease when I was 50; my father had died of brain cancer 25 years before, so I have always been a bit more tense than the average bear about increasing holes in my memory, and more egregious moments of dither. I thought of my 50s as late middle age. At 60, I tried to get this same dermatologist to authorize surgery to remove the pile of skin of my upper eyelid that gathered like a broken Roman shade at the eyelash line. “Look,” I said, “the eyelid has consumed my eyeball. I will not be able to see soon.” I pulled out an inch of skin to demonstrate my infirmity. He pulled out three inches of his own. “Ticktock,” he said. And he was right. All things skin had gone to hell, from the crepe of my forearms to lots of new precancerous lesions that he routinely froze off or biopsied, once making me use a horrible burning cream all over my face that turned me into Peeling Tomato Girl. So many indignities are involved in aging, and yet so many graces, too. The perfectionism that had run me ragged and has kept me scared and wired my whole life has abated. The idea of perfectionism at 60 is comical when, like me, you’ve worn non-matching black flats out on stage. In my experience, most of us age away from brain and ambition toward heart and soul, and we bathe in relief that things are not worse. When I was younger, I was fixated on looking good and impressing people and being so big in the world. By 60, I didn’t care nearly as much what people thought of me, mostly. And anyway, you know by 60 that people are rarely thinking of you. They are thinking about their own finances, family problems and upper arms. I have no idea of the process that released some of that clench and self-consciousness, except that by a certain age some people beloved to me had died. And then you seriously get real about how short and precious life is. You have bigger fish to fry than your saggy butt. Also, what more can you lose, and what more can people do to you that age has not already done? You thought you could physically do this or that — i.e., lift the dog into the back seat — but two weeks later your back is still complaining. You thought that your mind was thrilling to others, but it turns out that not everyone noticed, and now they’re just worried because your shoes don’t match. Anyway, as my dermatologist hinted, the tock did tick, and one day he was gone. He retired. Then last year, I heard he died.
Which brings us to death, deathly old death. At a few months shy of
70, with eyeballs squinting through the folds, I now face the possibility that I might die someday. My dad said after his cancer diagnosis that we are all on borrowed time, and it is good to be reminded of this now and again. It’s a great line, and the third-most-popular conversation we oldies have with each other, after the decline of our bodies and the latest senior moments: how many memorial services we go to these days. Some weeks, it feels as though there is a sniper in the trees, picking off people we have loved for years. It breaks your heart, but as Carly Simon sang, there is more room in a broken heart. My heart is the roomiest it has ever been. I do live in my heart more, which is hard in its own ways, but the blessing is that the yammer in my head is quieter, the endless questioning: What am I supposed to be doing? Is this the right thing? What do you think of that? What does he think of that? My parents and the culture told me that I would be happier if I did a certain thing, or stopped doing that, or tried harder and did better. But as my great friend Father Terry Richey said, it’s not about trying harder; it’s about resisting less. This is right up aging’s alley. Some days are sweet, some are just too long. A lot of us thought when we were younger that we might want to stretch ourselves into other areas, master new realms. Now, I know better. I’m happy with the little nesty areas that are mine. For some reason, I love my softer, welcoming tummy. I laugh gently more often at darling confused me’s spaced-outed ness, although I’m often glad no one was around to witness my lapses. Especially my son, who frequently and jovially brings up APlaceForMom.com. He’ll say, “I found you a really nice place nearby, where they’ll let you have a little dog!” Recently, I was graciously driving him and his teenage son somewhere and made a tiny driving mistake hardly worth mentioning — I did not hit anyone, nor did I leave the filling station with the nozzle still in the gas tank — and he said to his boy just loud enough so that I could hear, “I’m glad we live so close to town, so it won’t be as hard for her when we have to take away her keys.” I roared with laughter, and with love, and with an ache in my heart for something I can’t name.