The Wisdom of Age - by Susan Harness
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I feel older(er).
Age happened at some point between my 63rd and 64th year, forcing me to acknowledge how confident I’d become of my body’s ability to heal, to work effectively and efficiently in whatever task I required of it. I truly believed the statement, “Age is just a number.”
And why wouldn’t I? In my 50s I could hike seven miles at a stretch. I regularly swam a mile three times a week or took a 40-mile bike ride three times a week. My biggest accomplishment was hiking twenty-four miles across the Grand Canyon. I was exhausted as I dragged my body up the south rim, but I did it.
But in my early 60s, I felt as if I hit a wall. A chain reaction of medications and their side effects affected my joints and, more importantly, my digestive system. A bunion that developed on my left foot affected my gait, which affected my knee, which affected my hip, which sent sciatica pain shooting down the entire length of my leg. Soon my life seemed to consist of doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, and talks of surgeries. My spirit was quickly deflating.
Aging in America isn’t a conversation many of us are comfortable with, and we are encouraged not to be comfortable with it; we are surrounded by media and advertisements that say we don’t need to age. Or we don’t need to do it as badly as our parents did. We are persuaded that if we take the right vitamins, get the right number of hours of sleep and exercise properly all will be well. Although a good guide to follow, none of these staves off aging forever.
Recently, I visited with a couple of other women in the over-sixty category. I sighed with relief when our honest conversation revealed that not only our bodies were being affected by the passing years, but our minds as well. Yes, there’s a level of forgetfulness, of having to be more aware of where we set the car keys, jot down notes for the grocery store, or keep a to-do list handy. But in turn all of this affects how we think of ourselves. Unlike other countries and cultures, aging in the U.S. doesn’t translate to wisdom. The messages we receive is ‘move aside.’
That message creates a space for others to speak for us, dictating our recreational and living spaces, our friends, our interests! Let’s take back that space to talk with one another about what it feels like to age within our culture, our communities, and our families. Let’s ask questions that explore age discrimination and what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. Let’s consider how the messages we hear impact the messages we tell ourselves. And most importantly, let’s remind ourselves and each other that aging has given us a richness in our experiences and the knowledge only experience can provide, which we bring to a community.
So, let’s talk about what it’s really like to get older, the ups the downs, the realizations, the awareness of changes within ourselves, within the social spaces we live. People need to hear these stories. We need to tell them.
Susan Devan Harness, author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption, and Mixing Cultural Identities Through Transracial Adoption: Outcomes of the Indian Adoption Project (1958-1967) is a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes. As a cultural anthropologist, a writer, and an aging person, she is interested in people and their histories.
