Is aging gracefully a misnomer?

What does it mean to age gracefully? About ten minutes ago I saw a TV commercial, which was not very effective because I already forgot the name of the product, but it gave me the idea to write this article. In the United States, many English words and a large number of expressions have lost their meaning or have never had it.

In the commercial, a dermatologist and his wife, a psychotherapist, emphasize that they want to age gracefully, explaining why they each claim to take 25 supplements a day. This confuses me because I don’t think we can swallow pills to make ourselves graceful, which by definition is lean, agile, dainty, pretty, dainty, handsome, and slender. Thus, the meaning of aging gracefully continues to elude me.

Unless we die young, most of us will eventually look old. And, people who look old, with gray hair and wrinkles, and those with gnarled arthritic fingers and toes, and people who are stooped from osteoporosis, and those who have gained weight due to slow metabolism related to age or water retention, unfortunately they are not considered among the group that is aging gracefully. They rarely appear in commercials. So maybe aging gracefully really does mean “looking good” and “being aesthetically pleasing to the eye.”

Let us never forget the priceless message of the fox from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s children’s book, “The Little Prince.” The fox said: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” Being slender, agile, dainty, pretty, dainty, handsome, and slender are not always qualities available to the elderly among us. Even some young members of our society have never possessed these qualities. So maybe now is a good time to reconsider what’s important in life, in general. Suddenly my mind is filled and my body feels embraced by the amorphous images of grace; be accepting conditions; be charitable; to be nice; be affectionate; be compassionate; be loving; and being generous. The former are just a few of the many words listed in my thesaurus under “grace.” Then the expression aging gracefully would become aging gracefully. And imagine how nice it would be even to be young with grace.

Aging gracefully in this third millennium means you have few or no wrinkles (you’ve had a facelift, botox or collagen injections), your hair is colored (because you have it dyed regularly: highlights and highlights), or you look fabulous with gray hair (you’re lucky), you’re skinny (you’ve probably had liposuction, you’re on a fanatical diet, and you spend all your time in the gym), you’re physically prowess (good for you), your body is well-proportioned (you work out and excessive diets or implants) and take more than 25 supplements per day (hey, someone has to finance the industry).

And, if you use the expression age gracefully, you are among those who use the English language incorrectly and don’t really communicate with anyone because of this growing trend: the phenomenon that our verbal expressions are meaningless and we don’t really say what we mean. saying Aging gracefully also means knowing your limitations and changing your activities when your body yells “enough!” while begging you to switch from the strenuous sport your ego loves to an activity your aging body can more easily tolerate. And, more importantly, grace would mean that you would finally accept your new limitations. Perhaps ‘aging gracefully’ would be even more accurate in describing what our society is starving for. This would mean that we would grow old and become open-minded, tolerant, tolerant and patient.

Getting old used to mean giving back. According to Erik Erikson, the German developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory of human social development, he believes that our life spans eight stages. This article deals with the latter two:

Stage 7: ages 40-65 – Generativity vs. Stagnation where the optimal potential solution is ‘Caring’. AND,
Stage 8: 65 years until death – Integrity vs. Despair, where the optimal potential solution is ‘Wisdom’, which, among other things, is the acceptance of one’s life.

Wisdom, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is defined as: a) Accumulated philosophical or scientific knowledge-KNOWLEDGE; b) Ability to discern internal qualities and relationships-INSIGHT; c) Good sense-JUDGMENT.

This author does not believe that any number of supplements taken will ever provide the qualities of caring or wisdom.

People use the phrase ‘age gracefully’ but they really mean that as the years go by and your birthdays tell the story of your timeline, you will do whatever it takes to look young and convince others to believe that you are young. They are young. In this age of the third millennium it is sadly seen as a curse. And consequently, the greatest curse is that we do not revere our elders. Is there anything elegant about desperately clinging to youth, making people swallow 25 pills a day, having their bodies undergo cosmetic surgery, obsessively exercising, fanatically dieting, sometimes binging and purging, dressing in clothes designed for adolescents and even imitate the verbal expressions, facial and manual gestures of the young – the very generation born to replace them?

So what does ‘aging gracefully’ really mean? If you are capable of vigorous sports by all means, continue until your body says “no more!” If you believe in working out and eating right, by all means do it.

Introduce here the ‘great stretch of the mind towards consciousness’. Rigorously examine your reasons for dieting and exercising until you are a size one for an aging woman and a 32 waist for an aging man; examine why you would subject your body to a myriad of cosmetic surgical procedures; examine why you would buy all kinds of wrinkle creams; and wear tight, low-cut capri pants that expose your belly, along with tops that expose your six-pack upper abdomen. Are you really aging gracefully? Or, as the years go by, what they do to everyone (if you’re lucky), and the adding machine calculates it, what it does, is your psyche really denying the meaning behind it all? That no matter how desperately you cling to youth, you will die. We all die.

The return of the robe or muumuu is not even a consideration. Maybe your mothers or grandmothers wore them in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s. Aging gracefully doesn’t mean you have to wear house clothes. So what does ‘aging gracefully’ mean to you? And what do you think it means for others who age as you age?

Does the mirror, mirror on the wall really say it all? Are you really aging gracefully when what you see looking back is “yourself in your forties”? Who have you really let down? Are you still forty years old? Or, will you die just as you would otherwise as the person in the coffin who merely appears to be forty years old? Only now you’ve spent a lot of hard work and a lot of money trying to recapture your youth, which you’ve defined as ‘grace’. Paraphrasing the American writer Gertrude Stein, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” I believe that “our chronological age despite whatever form of appearance, or whatever amount of money we’ve spent, or whatever amount of exercise we’ve done, or whatever amount of self-sacrifice we’ve engaged in, is still our chronological age.” In other words, “Your age is your age is your age.” And, no matter what you do, you can’t fool Mother Nature!

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P. Brozinsky 2007 Copyright©, all rights reserved