Is aging gracefully a misnomer?

What does it mean to grow old gracefully? About ten minutes ago I saw a TV commercial, which wasn’t very effective because I already forgot the name of the product, but it gave me the idea to write this article. In the United States, many English words and a large number of expressions have lost their meaning or never had it.

In the commercial, a dermatologist and his wife, a psychotherapist, emphasize that they want to age gracefully, explaining why they each claim to take 25 supplements a day. This confuses me because I don’t think we can swallow pills to make ourselves elegant, which by definition is slim, agile, delicate, pretty, delicate, handsome and slim. Therefore, the meaning of aging gracefully continues to elude me.

Unless we die young, most of us will eventually look old. And, people who look old, with gray hair and wrinkles, and those with knobby arthritic fingers and toes, and people who are stooped from osteoporosis, and those who have gained weight due to slow metabolism related to age or water retention are unfortunately not considered among the group that is aging gracefully. They rarely appear in commercials. So maybe aging gracefully really does mean “looking good” and “being aesthetically pleasing to the eye.”

Let us never forget the priceless message of the fox from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s children’s book, “The Little Prince.” The fox said: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Being slim, agile, dainty, pretty, dainty, handsome, and slender are not always qualities available to the elderly among us. Even some young members of our society have never possessed these qualities. So maybe now is a good time to reconsider what’s important in life, in general. Suddenly my mind is filled and my body feels embraced by the amorphous images of grace; be accepting conditions; be charitable; to be nice; be affectionate; be compassionate; be loving; and being generous. The former are just a few of the many words listed in my thesaurus under “grace.” Then the expression aging gracefully would become aging gracefully. And imagine how nice it would be even to be gracefully young.

Aging gracefully in this third millennium means you either have few or no wrinkles (you’ve had a facelift, botox, or collagen injections), your hair is colored (because you’ve dyed it regularly: highlights and highlights), or you look fabulous with gray hair (lucky you), skinny (probably had liposuction, go on a fanatical diet and spend all your time in the gym), have great physical prowess (good for you), have a well-proportioned body (work out and binge dieting or have implants) and take more than 25 supplements per day (hey, someone has to fund the industry).

And, if you use the expression aging gracefully, you are among those who use the English language incorrectly and don’t really communicate with anyone because of this growing trend: the phenomenon that our verbal expressions lack meaning and we don’t really say what we mean Saying Aging Gracefully also means knowing your limitations and changing your activities when your body screams “enough!” while begging you to switch from the strenuous sport your ego loves to an activity your aging body can more easily tolerate. And, more importantly, grace would mean that you would finally accept your new limitations. Perhaps ‘aging gracefully’ would be even more accurate to describe what our society is hungry for. This would mean that we would grow old and become open-minded, easygoing, tolerant and patient.

Getting old used to mean giving back. According to Erik Erikson, the German developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory of human social development, he believes that our life spans eight stages. This article deals with the latter two:

Stage 7: ages 40-65 – Generativity vs. Stagnation where the optimal potential solution is ‘Care’. Y,
Stage 8: 65 years to death – Integrity vs. Desperation, where the optimal potential solution is ‘Wisdom’, which, among other things, is the acceptance of one’s own life.

Wisdom, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined as: a) The accumulated philosophical or scientific knowledge-KNOWLEDGE; b) Ability to discern qualities and internal relationships-INSIGHT; c) Good sense-JUDGMENT.

This author does not believe that any number of supplements ever ingested provide the qualities of care or wisdom.

People use the phrase ‘grow old gracefully’ but they really mean that as the years go by and their birthdays tell the story of their timeline, they will do whatever it takes to look young and convince others to believe that They are young. In this age of the third millennium it is unfortunately seen as a curse. And consequently, the greatest curse is that we do not venerate our elders. Is there something elegant about desperately clinging to youth, making people swallow 25 pills a day, subjecting their bodies to cosmetic surgery, exercising obsessively, dieting fanatically, sometimes bingeing and purging, dressing in clothes designed to adolescents and even imitate the verbal expressions, facial and manual gestures of the young – the same generation born to replace them?

So what does ‘aging gracefully’ really mean? If you are capable of vigorous sports by all means, continue until your body says “no more!” If you believe in exercising and eating well, by all means do so.

Introduce the ‘great stretch of the mind into awareness’ here. Take a hard look at your reasons for dieting and exercising until you’re a size one for an aging woman and a 32 waist for an aging man; examine why you would subject your body to myriad cosmetic surgical procedures; examine why you would buy all kinds of wrinkle creams; and wear tight, low-cut capri pants that expose your midriff, along with tops that expose your “six-pack” upper abdomen. Are you really aging gracefully? Or, as the years go by, what they do to everyone (if you’re lucky), and the adding machine calculates it, what it does, is your psyche really denying the meaning behind it all? That no matter how desperately you cling to youth, you will die. We all die.

The return of the robe or the moumuu is not even a consideration. Maybe their mothers or grandmothers wore them in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. Growing old gracefully doesn’t mean you should wear loungewear. So what does ‘aging gracefully’ mean to you? And what do you think it means for others who age as you age?

Does the mirror, mirror on the wall really say it all? Are you really aging gracefully when what you see looking back is “your forty-year-old self”? Who have you really disappointed? Are you still forty years old? Or, will you die just as you would otherwise as the person in the coffin who simply appears to be forty years old? Only now you have spent a lot of hard work and a lot of money trying to recapture your youth, which you have defined as ‘grace’. To paraphrase the American writer Gertrude Stein, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” I believe that “our chronological age despite any form of appearance, or amount of money we have spent, or any amount of exercise we have done, or any amount of self-denial we have engaged in, is still our chronological age.” In other words, “Your age is your age is your age.” And, no matter what you do, you can’t fool Mother Nature!

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P. Brozinsky 2007 Copyright©, all rights reserved