There is a lot that is annoying, and even terrible,about aging. The creakiness of the body; the driftingof the memory; the reprising of personal history adnauseam, with only yourself to listen.
变老有太多恼人和糟糕的事情:身体变差,记忆力下降,没完没了地重复个人的过去,并且只有你一个听众。
But there is also something profoundly liberatingabout aging: an attitude, one that comes hard won.Only when you hit 60 can you begin to say, withgreat aplomb: “I’m too old for this.”
This line is about to become my personal mantra. I have been rehearsing it vigorously, amazedat how amply I now shrug off annoyances that once would have knocked me off my perch.
A younger woman advised me that “old” may be the wrong word, that I should consider I’m toowise for this, or too smart. But old is the word I want. I’ve earned it.
And let’s just start with being an older woman, shall we? Let others feel bad about their chickenwings — and their bottoms, their necks and their multitude of creases and wrinkles. I’m too oldfor this. I spent years, starting before I was a teenager, feeling insecure about my looks.
No feature was spared. My hairline: Why did I have to have a widow’s peak, at 10? My toes: tooshort. My entire body: too fat, and once, even, in the depths of heartbreak, much too thin.Nothing felt right. Well, O.K., I appreciated my ankles. But that’s about it.
What torture we inflict upon ourselves. If we don’t whip ourselves into loathing, then meangirls, hidden like trolls under every one of life’s bridges, will do it for us.
Even the vogue for strange-looking models is little comfort; those women look perfectly,beautifully strange, in a way that no one else does. Otherwise we would all be modeling.
One day recently I emptied out an old trunk. It had been locked for years; I had lost the keyand forgotten what was in there. But, curiosity getting the best of me on a rainy afternoon, Imanaged to pry it open with a screwdriver.
It was full of photographs. There I was, ages 4 to 40. And I saw for the first time that evenwhen I was in the depths of despair about my looks, I had been beautiful.
箱子里面装满了我4岁到40岁的照片。我第一次发现,虽然对自己的长相曾深感绝望,可是曾经的我很美丽。
And there were all my friends; girls and women with whom I had commiserated countless timesabout hair, weight, all of it, doling out sympathy and praise, just as I expected it heaped uponme: beautiful, too. We were, we are, all beautiful. Just like our mothers told us, or should have. (Ahem.)
Those smiles, radiant with youth, twinkled out of the past, reminding me of the smiles I knowtoday, radiant with strength.
照片中的笑容,洋溢着青春的气息,提醒着自己今日我所知的笑容散发着一股力量。
Young(er) women, take this to heart: Why waste time and energy on insecurity? I have nodoubt that when I’m 80 I’ll look at pictures of myself when I was 60 and think how young I wasthen, how filled with joy and beauty.
I’m happy to have a body that is healthy, that gets me where I want to go, that maybe sagsand complains, but hangs in there. So maybe I’m too old for skintight jeans, too old for six-inch stilettos, too old for tattoos and too old for green hair.
Weight gain? Simply move to the looser end of the wardrobe, and stop hanging with Ben andJerry. No big deal. Nothing to lose sleep over. Anyway, I’m too old for sleep, or so it seemsmost nights.
Which leaves me a bit cranky in the daytime, so it is a good thing I can now work from home.Office politics? Sexism? I’ve seen it all. Watching men make more money, doing less work.Reading the tea leaves as positions shuffle, listening to the kowtow and mumble of stifledresentment.
I want to tell my younger colleagues that it doesn’t matter. Except the sexism, which, likepoison ivy, is deep-rooted: You weed the rampant stuff, but it pops up again.
What matters most is the work. Does it give you pleasure, or hope? Does it sustain your soul?My work as a climate activist is the hardest and most fascinating I’ve ever done. I’m too old forthe dark forces, for hopelessness and despair. If everyone just kept their eyes on the ball, andfollowed through each swing, we’d all be more productive, and not just on the golf course.
The key to life is resilience, and I’m old enough to make such a bald statement. We will alwaysbe knocked down. It’s the getting up that counts. By the time you reach upper middle age, youhave started over, and over again.
But I am too old to try to change people. By now I’ve learned, the very hard way, that what yousee in someone at the beginning is what you get forevermore. Most of us are receptive to a bitof behavior modification. But through decades of listening to people complain aboutmarriages or lovers, I hear the same refrains.
I have come to realize that there is comfort in the predictability, even the ritualization, ofrelationship problems. They become a dance step; each partner can twirl through familiarmoves, and do-si-do until the music stops.
Toxic people? Sour, spoiled people? I’m simply walking away; I have little fight left in me. It’seasier all around to accept that friendships have ebbs and flows, and indeed, there’s somethingquite beautiful about the organic nature of love.
I used to think that one didn’t make friends as one got older, but I’ve learned that the oppositehappens. Sometimes, unaccountably, a new person walks into your life, and you find you arenever too old to love again. And again. (See resilience.)
One is never too old for desire. Having entered the twilight of my dating years, I can tell you it ismuch easier to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of anticipation and disappointment whenyou’ve had plenty of experience with the shoals and eddies of shallow waters. Emphasis onshallow. By now, we know deep.
Take a pass on bad manners, on thoughtlessness, on unreliability, on carelessness and on allthe other ways people distinguish themselves as unappealing specimens. Take a pass on yourown unappealing behavior, too: the pining, yearning, longing and otherwise frittering away ofvaluable brainwaves that could be spent on Sudoku, or at least a jigsaw puzzle, if not thatBeethoven sonata you loved so well in college.
My new mantra is liberating. At least once a week I encounter a situation that in the old(young) days would have knocked me to my knees or otherwise spun my life off center.
Now I can spot trouble 10 feet away (believe me, this is a big improvement), and I can say tomyself: Too old for this. I spare myself a great deal of suffering, and as we all know, there isplenty of that to be had without looking for more.
If there can be such a thing as a best-selling app like Yo, which satisfies so many urges toboldly announce ourselves, I want one called 2old4this. A signature kiss-off to all that wasonce vexatious. A goodbye to all that has done nothing but hold us back. That would be an appworth having. But, thankfully, I’m too old to need such a thing.