Prime Time - Jane Fonda [57]
During a meeting in Atlanta, Dr. Matheny told me, “Life has shown you that you survived before, you’ll survive again. And since you now are no longer competing like you were earlier, there is not as much hypervigilance, there are more acceptances, letting things develop. You can’t possibly oppose every force that comes up, every little problem that you’ve got, and so learning to accept and, I think, accommodate and adjust is every bit as important as mastery because you can’t master that many things. So it is like martial arts—if the force comes, you don’t oppose it, you just try to guide it. And I think there is something of that that happens with age.”
Dr. Carstensen concurs. “Elders tend to know what they want and need to make their lives richer and deeper, and they are able to discard what they no longer need,” she told me.
We are less apt to be thrown by outside events. When people are very young they have long and nebulous futures ahead of them and all sorts of information might be useful even though it might not be useful immediately. It is very informative to know where the tiger is hiding in the brush. But once you know that, you don’t have to keep going back to visit the brush. You don’t need to spend so much time preparing, you just know. So as the future becomes shorter, you know what information is relevant to your goals and what isn’t because your goals are clearer; you know what you are focused on; you know what is important and what is not; you can separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. What is relevant to your goals you will learn quickly and you’ll let the rest go. I’ve spent the last thirty years investigating the psychology of aging and my research consistently shows that, in terms of emotions, the best years come late in life.… Older people as a group suffer less from depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than their younger counterparts. In everyday life, they experience fewer negative emotions but just as many positive ones as people in their twenties and thirties—the people we stereotypically think of as the most happy.3
Carstensen also notes that seniors are less apt to bear grudges and that they pick their fights carefully, which is why we make good mediators and facilitators.
Many psychologists have identified the Positivity of aging. According to John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “As people get older, they seem to be willing to accept things that, when we’re young, we would find disturbing and vexing.” Betrayal, for instance, is so hard to accept when we are young. But Dr. Gabrieli believes that seniors may be more able to see things from the other person’s perspective and thus don’t view certain actions as betrayal. He says, “It paves the way for you to be sympathetic to the situation from his perspective, to be less disturbed from her perspective.” He calls this “compassionate detachment,” which doesn’t mean not caring or that we’ve become bankrupt of certitudes. It means having no personal agenda, no ego stake in outcomes. This means that with age, we can be more trustworthy—it’s easier for us to see all sides and give advice that comes more from our heart than from our ego.
As I learned about the Positivity that seems to come with age, it began to feel more and more like wisdom. Experts on such things have never quite come to an agreement on what constitutes wisdom or whether we get wiser with age, but the descriptions of it that resonate with me include:
The ability to step outside oneself and assess troublesome situations with calm reflection.
The ability to regulate our