As mask-wearing mandates end, and I increasingly confront my unexposed face in the mirror, I’m struck with the realization that I’m aging fast — faster, in fact, than I expected.
I cannot blame it on genetics. My mother, her mother and my father all looked younger than their years.
So, DNA’s not to blame.
COVID, I believe, is the culprit. It’s all the enforced “at-home-ness.” All the over-eating. All the navel-gazing, fear and worry of the past two years.
I’ve always been a “glass half-full” kind of person, but increasingly I’m taking a pessimistic view of the world. Thanks, Putin. Thanks, Xi. Thanks, climate change. And, thanks, anti-maskers, anti-vax-ers, and, yes, of course, COVID-19.
Decidedly, all this lack of engagement in the world has not been good for me. Even being grateful — abundantly grateful — for being healthy and busy, working while sheltering-in-place in a lovely home beside a wonderful husband, it doesn’t mitigate thatit’s been a hell of a time for me and for us all, right?
And even with US COVID rates falling, the disease still flourishes and I, like many of you I suspect, are wary that the proverbial other shoe has yet to drop.
It’s all made me feel exhausted and, getting back to my original point, old — older than my actual age. Yet, I take some small comfort that this feeling is not in my “head” or even aching bones or that I’m alone in experiencing it.
A recent article in the science journal Nature suggests that the unsettling, isolating, disruptive pandemic has indeed sped up the aging process for people. The psychologist Adam Grant describes the aches, the physical signs of aging (the gray hair, the wrinkles) and the chronic “meh” feelings many of us are newly experiencing as symptoms of “languishing.”
Another expert, Alicia Arbaje at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, agrees many people today are feeling “older than they are” and suffering from “an impression of being thrown off course . . . of disconnect from your purpose.”
Dr. Arbaje, a specialist in geriatric medicine, adds, “Once you begin to lose touch with that (sense of purpose), it creates a sense of chronic stress, which can directly accelerate aging.”
Now, if the “good” news is that I — we — are not crazy to feel what we’re feeling, the question is: What should we do about it? The answer to me is “simple,” but, of course, hard to accomplish: carry on. Do the best we can. Find comfort in small pleasures.
Put in another, less sunny way, in a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through Hell, keep going.” However you frame it, the point is the same: we must keep going and ideally find pleasure and purpose where we can.
Franz Kafka, who never struck me as an optimistic sort of fellow, offered this surprisingly uplifting perspective: “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” I like that a lot. And so, as I’m shrugging off my mask and my gloom, I’m working hard to see the “glass half full” again as well as the beauty around me.
I found another quote from Susan Moon, author of This is Getting Old that resonated with me:
“It annoys me when people say, ‘Even if you’re old, you can be young at heart!’ Hiding inside this well-meaning phrase is a deep cultural assumption that old is bad and young is good. What’s wrong with being old at heart, I’d like to know? Wouldn’t you like to be loved by people whose hearts have practiced loving for a long time?”
Recently I experienced something like what Susan Moon described. It happened in of all places, my one-on-one Pilates class. In passing, my youngish instructor mentioned a painful moment from her teenage years. Even as I was huffing and puffing, struggling to perform the exercise at hand, I realized she revealed something that could not be ignored.
I stopped — not just to catch my breath — then responded. I shared a similar painful experience from my long-ago high school years and asked if she thought I was to “blame” for what had happened. “Of course not. You were so young,” she quickly replied.
Then, she paused, realizing the point. She was doing that exact same thing, blaming herself for being young and inexperienced.
The relief and release from guilt and shame that swept over her were actually visible.
It was a conversation — and an insight — that self-absorbed younger me could not have offered. So, even though older me can’t do a push-up to save my life, at least I can provide a mitzvah of understanding and lovingkindness.
Insights or push-ups? Sometimes there are tradeoffs in life. Now that I’m older, I’ve got the wisdom to recognize that. Maybe I’m not so furious after all!
