During the late nineties I worked\u00a0on a memoir for Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane fame. She and her\u00a0friend, Janis Joplin, were two of the first women rock and rollers and they\u00a0were known for being outrageous and unpredictable. I worked with Grace for six
months and she was unapologetically herself all the time. She had a lot to say\u00a0about aging which she wasn\u2019t too happy about.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was walking around my house a\u00a0few days ago,\u201d she said, \u201c and I passed a photo hanging on the wall of Janis\u00a0and me. We were in our late twenties, we were dead-panning the camera and the\u00a0photo became a classic. A little further down the hall, there was a mirror.
When I looked into it, I gasped. I thought there was a stranger in my house. I\u00a0kept looking from the photo to the mirror. Who was that old lady looking back\u00a0at me? She didn\u2019t resemble the photo next to it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
I understand. I have photos from my\u00a0ballet days and I look vastly different, but I don\u2019t have the urge to change\u00a0anything. I have no judgments on people getting face lifts or using fillers. I\u00a0think everyone should do what makes them comfortable but that isn\u2019t for me. I\u00a0want to go through every natural phase of life to see what it is, where it\u2019s\u00a0taking me and the lessons that are there for me to learn.<\/p>\n
If we don\u2019t like what we see in the\u00a0mirror, instead of shaming ourselves, it might be a good idea to stop looking\u00a0outward and start looking in. Maybe that\u2019s the gift of not liking what we see.\u00a0We have an opportunity to change our focus and be with ourselves in a less
superficial way. A friend of mine was joking about being glad her eyesight was\u00a0getting bad so she couldn\u2019t get a clear picture of how she looked. But what if\u00a0it isn\u2019t a joke? What if it\u2019s a gift in disguise? I\u2019m trying to find grace in\u00a0aging instead of making it wrong or ugly. You don\u2019t see children feeling shame about\u00a0being young. So why should we feel shame about being old? They\u2019re both a part\u00a0of being human.<\/p>\n
Eleanor Roosevelt said, \u201cBeautiful\u00a0young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of\u00a0art.\u201d<\/p>\n
I recently saw a photograph of an\u00a0elderly Native American woman whose face was so wrinkled, it looked like a\u00a0roadmap of her life. I was taken with her beauty. It felt like her wisdom was tattooed\u00a0on her face. Every wrinkle told a story of laughter, tears, resilience and suffering. I felt drawn to her. I wanted to know her and learn from her<\/p>\n
It\u2019s so much easier to accept aging\u00a0when you\u2019re in a culture that honors and appreciates elderly\u00a0wisdom more than the stuff we have
and the way we look. Wisdom offers us a way out of anxiety. A way into\u00a0compassion and peace. A way out of depression. A way into acceptance and love.\u00a0Buddhist philosophy tells us that we can\u2019t age gracefully unless we live\u00a0gracefully. A friend who is thirty years my junior asked me how it felt to be\u00a0in my seventies. I said, \u201cIt\u2019s strange. I never imagined I would get this old\u00a0but I want is to do this aging thing with some dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n
I starred in a movie when I was\u00a0nineteen and when I watched it back the, I judged myself. I wasn\u2019t pretty\u00a0enough. I wasn\u2019t skinny enough. On the first day of shooting, I heard a\u00a0playback of my voice and it sounded so bad to me, I thought they were going to\u00a0fire me. Fast forward five decades and when I view the movie now, I see that I
am all of those things that I had wanted to be. I had been criticizing myself\u00a0so harshly, I couldn\u2019t see the truth of who I was.<\/p>\n
At this stage in my life, I\u2019m\u00a0working at accepting change. As a society, we\u2019re not good at it. But if we can\u00a0find the courage to do it, the reward is finding some peace. Everything that is\u00a0alive changes and so do things that are not alive. The chair I\u2019m sitting in\u00a0right now is showing wear on its arms. The leather is pulling away from the
wood and the metal is slightly rusting. I feel attached to it but I\u2019ve decided\u00a0to replace it and learn to appreciate the one that takes its place.<\/p>\n
There is a story about a woman,\u00a0Charlotte, who went into her garden every morning. She was 88, her joints\u00a0protested, but she took a great deal of pleasure from her beautiful roses. She\u00a0had planted them when she was young, promising herself that she would spend
time with them some day. Now \u201csome day\u201d was here. She sat there for hours and\u00a0her neighbors asked her if she ever got lonely. She said that she got lonely\u00a0when she looked back. But she had learned to be present by feeling the warm sun\u00a0on her hands, hearing the birds and watching the roses come into bloom. She saw\u00a0aging not as a closing but rather as a slow transformation into something
freer. As she sat in her chair with petals blooming at her feet, Charlotte felt\u00a0herself blooming, too.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been talking to some friends\u00a0of all different ages and here\u2019s a summary of what they told me:<\/p>\n
When you turn 40, you think you\u2019re not
young any more<\/p>\n
When you turn 50, you think you\u2019re\u00a0getting old.<\/p>\n
When you turn 60, you think you are old.<\/p>\n
When you turn 70, you think you\u2019re\u00a0really old and you keep thinking about dying.<\/p>\n
When you turn 80, you don\u2019t careany more.\u00a0Go figure.<\/p>\n
Mark Twain said, \u201cAge is an issue of mind over matter. If you don\u2019t mind, it doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During the late nineties I worked\u00a0on a memoir for Grace Slick, lead singer of Jefferson Airplane fame. She and her\u00a0friend, Janis Joplin, were two of the first women rock and rollers and they\u00a0were known for being outrageous and unpredictable. I worked with Grace for sixmonths and she was unapologetically herself all the time. She had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2725"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2726,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2725\/revisions\/2726"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}