Anne Lamott reflects on aging.

Sam Lamott/Sam Lamott

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Sam Lamott/Sam Lamott

Anne Lamott reflects on aging.

Sam Lamott/Sam Lamott

Getting older has been a punchline for as long as anyone can remember. From Rodney Dangerfield describing the danger of blowing out his birthday candles to Phyllis Diller talking about her blood type getting discontinued.

There are plenty of jokes to be made about aging. But it can also have some negative implications, says Becca Levy, a professor and researcher at Yale School of Public Health, who studies the psychology of aging.

“Unfortunately, there still is quite a bit of ageism that we need to navigate in everyday life that we see on television and magazines and advertisements, social media. There’s a lot of negative messages there,” Levy told NPR.

She encourages older adults to keep in mind how they are affected by stereotypes and also by the structural aspects of age bias.

“It impacts everybody. So we all are aging, and we all have loved ones who are aging. And so I think it’s very much part of everybody’s existence.”

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Looking back on life

Writer Anne Lamott has been writing about her experience of aging, and how it’s made her see things differently.

“You know, we’ve got this weird judgy thing inside of us and age has softened that. And God, what a blessing. And with a new pair of glasses, I think you realize, for me in my mid-sixties, that there is grace in myopia, that there is grace in not being able to see everything so clearly with all of its faults and annoying tendencies,” Lamott told Consider This host Mary Louise Kelly.

Lamott says she has a story that she lives by, which goes like this:

“When my very best friend since high school was dying of breast cancer, and we went into a store, she was in a wheelchair, with a wig on, about a month before she died, and I was buying a cute, little dress for the current fixer-upper boyfriend. And I came out, and it was tighter than I’m used to. I usually dress like John Goodman. And I said to her, ‘Do you think this makes me look big in the thighs?’”

And she looked at me, and she said, ‘Annie, you don’t have that kind of time.’
And I think one of the great blessings of getting older is that you realize this. By my age, I’ve lost a lot of really precious and sometimes younger friends. And boy, is that a wake-up call to start making some smarter choices about how you’re going to spend this one precious and fleeting life.”

Empathy towards oneself

Lamott added that in her view, harboring gentleness and forgiveness towards oneself is the one of the most difficult challenges of life.

“When Bill Wilson was getting AA started in the ’30s, he had a priest friend who wasn’t actually an alcoholic. And the priest friend said to Bill, ‘Sometimes I think that heaven is just a new pair of glasses, and I have learned to put on those pair of glasses and to look at how touching people are and how hard everybody’s life has been – what rough edges life involves and how heroically they’ve tried to rise to the occasion.’

And for those who feel that aging is still so very far off in the distance?

“As they say, [aging] isn’t for wusses. And my body is not what it was. A lot of things hurt. And my mind – I have what I like to think of as age-appropriate cognitive decline, but I am spaced out. And some days, it does feel like there’s a sniper in the trees, picking off people I can’t live without,” she said.

“But by the same token, life just keeps on giving. And it’s such a beautiful thing to have been given a human life – aches and pains and spacing out and all – and you will be amazed by how much you love it if you put on those better pair of glasses and you start looking around for all that still works, no matter how much has been taken away.”

This episode was produced by Jordan-Marie Smith and Tyler Bartlam, with additional reporting by Andee Tagle