Growing older

on loving the process of ageing

It seems like there is an aversion to growing old. Crossing over to one’s 30s would symbolize the loss of youth or people would quip that they are ‘forever 25’, as though there is something ghastly about being older than 29.

When I was younger I have always wanted to grow older faster to acquire the agency to make decisions. I had felt stuck in the body of a child (I would go on to find out I would feel stuck no matter what).

It turns out that agency is not a given even in adulthood, it exists purely only as a concept until it is consciously sought and executed.

Growing older for me, is about earning the time to accumulate enough data, knowledge, self-knowledge, stories, experiences to help determine the course of our lives. We become better at curating what we choose to let in and let go.

In the course of trying to determine my own life, I had made a lot of mistakes, hurt a lot of people, chalked up some irrecoverable regret. Relationships I thought would last a lifetime were destroyed, in trying to do the “right” thing for my work I had done a lot of damage in my personal life. I could swim in this misery for a long time, if I had believed that to be my narrative.

But if we are lucky, if we had enough time, if we are blessed enough to meet a wide-enough spectrum of people and stories, have had enough space to contemplate, we increase the permutations of the way we see the world and inevitably, ourselves.

For me, that is the best part of growing old. It is not only just about having agency, it is about using it to expose myself to the widest diversity of thought, beliefs and experiences coupled with growing the self-knowledge and awareness to discern what I wish to cherry-pick or how I should formulate my own. It is being old enough to live to see that a lot of societal or popular conventions are just plain wrong or not absolute, that there is no one right way to live. It is about believing in closing chapters and we can choose to open new ones. That I can muster the courage to accept the ugliness of my history and be grateful that it has shaped me nonetheless. It is tremendously powerful to fully face one’s negative experiences, to not let them have power over me. I could choose to consciously honor them instead. The plethora of mistakes I have made in the foolishness of my youth has served to save me more grief in my future. I wish I had more courage to take on more risks, not less. Every adventure I went on, added to the possible permutations of the future.

I love getting older. Aging has taught me the older I grow, the less I know, but it also means there is more of the unknown to explore and anticipate. It took me more than three decades of living to learn that I am bad at predicting my own future, and it is often pleasantly surprising if I cultivate the right mindset and the space to receive it.

Age has given me more strength to resist societal pressure (still hard!) because I have enough positive emotions and experiences to draw upon. I could now think about all those times when I had ignored my own instincts or needs and suffered for it. I learned to stop giving my power away needlessly. I could now trust myself a little more, because I had lived the consequences of my decisions and thrived on them.

It has also taught me the compound effect of time. There have been so many seemingly innocuous events which were set in motion decades ago, only to be part of a much more profound compilation of events in recent years.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” — Steve Jobs

I have grown old enough to realize that it isn’t the peaks and valleys that matter to me. It is all about developing the awareness to appreciate the gifts and beauty of the ordinary. The sacredness of the mundane.

I have learned that what keeps me alive isn’t the work I do or the achievements I have accumulated — they have mostly left me feeling empty because they are extrinsic, as if my existence depended on them. I could accomplish nothing, but feel the most alive if I could grow the capacity to love people, my self, the interdependency which binds everything in this world. When I find myself loving like that — that in some moments I find myself loving the generosity of nature, the marvel of what it takes for life to be in place, that it took the survival of so many of our ancestors for any of us to be alive — it is admittedly difficult to keep myself in this space, but when I love like that, there is so much living I wish to do, so much curiosity about what could unfold in the future.

I had spent most of my life wishing myself dead, so this feels wondrous to me. I have become better at telling myself the right stories.

This is what age has gifted to me. Enough time, to witness and experience different permutations of variables and possibilities, enough self-determination to distribute time and allocate resources against conventional wisdom, enough depth in the repository of stories we tell in our heads.

I am 35 now, and it feels like I am finally in a position to determine how I wish to live, to decide how to distribute my power, to honor my inner voice, to define my own meaning of life. It wasn’t possible when I was younger, because my exposure to life wasn’t deep or wide enough.

I can only look forward to getting older, to deepen my capacity to bear witness to life, and to experience aliveness in its intense full spectrum: pain, joy, and all.