GIFT OF OLDER AGE

Bought me some new sneakers, but they are still in the box. 

After more than a year of daily treadmill trekking, I know it's time to replace my shoes. I have the new sneakers but have been holding off wearing them, since I've grown fond of the older ones. They've gotten really comfortable. This got me to thinking about some ways I've gotten comfortable getting older.

“There’s a shady side and a sunny side,” says 90 year old Joshua Haberman. He was talking about people growing old. Longevity has its compensations. He cites six.

  I'M WRONG    Haberman is increasingly apt to consider the possibility he’s wrong, a gift of old age he labeled “liberation from the compulsion to set everyone else straight.” He has loosened up, since his more dogmatic youth.

  TRANQUILITY    “If you are fortunate, you have achieved in old age what you have wanted to,” he said. The important battles have been waged, the decisions made. “You no longer have to do the pushing, the striving, the struggle.”

  THE COOLING OF PASSION    “You don’t rush to quick action,” Haberman explained. “You’re more likely to stop and think.” These days I'm hardly indifferent to the world’s problems, he added, but I'm less inclined to think I can solve them, or that they’re solvable at all.

  THE ART OF SUBMISSION    Americans are activists by nature, but “more happens to us than we cause to happen,” he has found. “You have to accept the unalterable.”

  GRATITUDE    The fifth benefit of growing old, “one of the most important marks of maturity,” is gratitude. “I’m more conscious of the little favors people do — the driver who stops and lets me cross the street, the newspaper man who brings my paper directly to the door,” Haberman said. He feels more aware of humanity’s interconnectedness. “I am a zero by myself.”

  FAMILY    Concluding his list: greater involvement with his family, including his wife of nearly 65 years, four children, 15 grandchildren and nine great grandchildren. Yes, he does think about death, but he doesn't pretend to fully understand it and he’s not afraid of it. 

He says, "As I grow older, I care less and less what people think about me and more and more what God thinks of me. I expect to be with him much longer than with you.”