Lighter With Age
“Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.”
This week I disappeared down a rabbit hole of reading and research. I began my week planning to write a blog post about seeking our true north, only to discover that much that has been written on the subject pertains specifically to leadership. I then veered course and listened to a reading by Mary Pipher at one of her favourite Washington D.C. bookstores, Politics and Prose. I thought because Pipher’s book is titled Women Rowing North, that she might provide some insights into finding our true north. She did talk about the great gifts of this life stage, which she calls the northern lights, but I’ll save that for another blog post. Instead, I was intrigued by her comments about aging and ageism and I veered off course once again to learn more about the disconnect between society’s stereotypes of aging and how the happiest people in the U.S. are women over 65 years.
And that led me to an article May Sarton wrote for the New York Times in 1978. I know May Sarton for her poetry. I’ve included some of her poems in my course, Women Rowing North: Writing Our Life Stories. But Sarton was much more than just a poet. She was also a prolific novelist and memoirist, writing journals until her death in her early 80’s.
She was 65 years old when she wrote the article Lighter with Age for the New York Times. At first I thought of folding her words into a broader blog post but her article, written 43 years ago, expresses many of my feelings about this aging journey and so this week, I thought I would share the article with you. I am fascinated by the commonalities we share as women on this aging journey, and how these commonalities transcend time. I’d be interested to know if you hear your thoughts expressed through May Sarton’s words.
Lighter With Age
YORK, Me—Lately, we have had a great infusion of information about the old. They are this or that, we are told. They are a problem. We must show concern. They are suddenly at 65 called “senior citizens” though no one has ever heard of a junior citizen and citizenship is hardly a category 'since it is almost universal. I mind being stuffed into a pigeonhole, “taken care of” as though I had ceased to exist as a growing person. I begin to feel like a leper; for old age, too, there is no cure.
When I was 17, I already began to look forward to being old. Far from a liability, I saw it as possibly the most interesting of adventures to come, and in that vision I was not far wrong. My 65th year, just past, has been the happiest and most fruitful so far. I do not see diminution except in sustained energy, but the lack of energy is more than made up for by my knowing better how to handle myself. I have more fun because I am less compulsive, less driven by time curiously enough, and more able to “take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs.”
It is not, perhaps, that the old are a problem, but that the best things about old age are so outside our ethos that we cannot, some of us, even imagine a state of growth that might have to do with contemplation, pure joy, and above all the elimination of the nonessential.
It is the privilege of the old to feel less guilt about the undone, and what a joy that can be! Material things become less and less important, though small comforts are helpful (but, then, at what age are they not? My mother could not have survived without a cup of tea in the afternoon).
The old have more right to self-interest, in the sense of self-exploration. I shocked an old friend the other day by saying, “I am more interested in myself than in anyone else.” She took it as a sign of horrifying egotism, but at 65 and after I think we have earned the right to make our souls in peace, and the making of a soul depends on time, time for reflection, time that may look empty from the outside.
“Poor old man sitting in the sun doing nothing,” we might think. But the old man on a park bench may actually be very busy doing nothing because he is being something. He may, to use a haunting phrase of Florida Scott‐Maxwell's, be “blind with insight.” Self‐exploration is a natural organic way toward understanding the universal. Whatever may be discovered is, at any rate, authentic.
The myth of old age as chiefly a disability, as a sad ending of everything most desired by man, has been created by the young. But even in my time, there have been superb exemplars of the old as fertile and joyful givers - Casals, Stravinsky, Stokowski, Rubinstein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Wallace Stevens, Will and Ariel Durant, Cousteau - the list is endless. Each of us has known at least one old person who continued to be life‐enhancing to the end, who made one look on old age as something marvelous, to be attained as all good things are, because of a passionate commitment to life.
Who wants it to be easy? Not surely the old themselves. They are well aware that growth is always costly, and that growing rather than withering into old age is no exception. How does one grow old?
I suspect there are as many answers to that question as there are individual human beings in the world. Old age does not mean that one ceases to be taken by surprise by life, or by love, for that matter. The myth that the old lack the capacity for love relationships has already been explored by psychologists, only it has not yet been fully absorbed by the laity.
Love, we still think, many of us, is for the young. But what do they really know about it? It is hard for them to differentiate between sexual passion and love itself, for instance. If the whole of life is a journey toward old age, then I believe it is also a journey toward love. And love may be as intense in old age as it was in youth, only it is different, set in a wider arc, and the more precious because the time we have to enjoy it in is bound to be brief.
Old age is not a fixed point, any more than sunrise or sunset or the ocean tide. At every instant the psyche is in flux: “And like a newborn spirit did he, pass/Through the green evening quiet in the sun,” as Keats put it.
On the edge of old age myself I sense that we may be “newborn spirits”, at any moment in time, if we have the courage. Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.