It Is Special To Be Old

A wise article on aging from a young writer. Beginning with Renee Zellwegger’s mysterious transformation, Danielle Berrin writes in Renee Zellweger’s tragic beauty lesson that the idea of aging well, without fighting to retain one’s youth, especially by artificial means, is

a lovely ideal, and I’m sure that many people are content and proud that their outsides match their insides. But the fact is, with all that is available to us to augment our own images — images of God! — it has become an act of almost spiritual resistance to remain as you are. . . .

One of my prayers is that these pressures will change. That we will see aging as the fulfillment of blessing, as evidence of a well-lived life. For it is special to be young, and to be your most beautiful. And it is special to be old, and be your most accomplished, and be your most wise.

An act of almost spiritual resistance to remain as you are. Of course the guy with the white beard will like this, you say, because he apparently can’t be bothered not to remain as he is. He’s willing to look older than he is.

And there’s something to that, but even the guy with the white beard (that would be me, by the way) finds himself distressed after a thrift store clerk offers him the senior citizen discount given to people eight years older than him (and he notices the exact number of years because he’s not that old). You look at your reflection in store windows as you walk away looking for evidence that the clerk had been absurdly wrong.

The young writer may think you’re at your most accomplished and wisest, and you may feel the kind of mastery of your gifts that only comes with age, but even when you think you’ve escaped your culture’s ideal of youth and accepted the gifts of age, and even grow a beard that makes you look older, you find yourself thinking more that age is costly than that it is special.