How to Age Gracefully

By KCY

            Age. When you are a kid, you cannot wait for your birthday. You’re not three years old, but “just past three” or three and three quarters. Sixteen is sweet, at eighteen you can vote and at twenty-one you can drink alcohol while gambling in a casino in Vegas. Each birthday is a celebration.

            But then…. thirty hits. That’s when you decide to have your last hurrah. Because now you are officially OLD. You have a party to celebrate leaving your youth and officially now entering adulthood.

            Forty creeps up on you and that’s when you hit your mid-life crisis. Or maybe at fifty this happens to you. And birthdays no longer become something that you look forward to. At forty, you start worrying about life after retirement. You start wondering what is your purpose in life. What is the secret to life? How do you get rid of those grey hairs and smooth those wrinkles which have appeared? How can you stay young and what’s the secret to a happy life?

            Well…. I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Something one of my active ninety-two-year-old patients told me.

            The secret to staying young and living a long happy life is not Botox. It’s not hair dye. It’s not plastic surgery. And it’s certainly not shopping at Forever 21 when you are seventy-one!

            According to Mr. Finklestein, the secret is to…. not look back.

            Seems so simple, right? To not look back. Mr. Finklestein swears upon this. Whatever decisions you have made be it career, who you married, heck, what you ate that morning, don’t even think about it after it happens. Don’t look back.

            When he told me this, I laughed. Not because it was funny but because this is the exact opposite thing that I do. I look back on everything. I agonize about every decision I have made in the past, including what I ate that morning. And a lot of people do.

            “How do you do that?” I asked him.

            Mr. Finklestein shrugged. “Just move on. Just remember that you make the best decisions that you can with the information that you have at that time. Because that’s all you can do. And just live with that decision. Don’t look back. I promise you that whatever decision you made was fine. You just have to remember that and look to the future,” he finished as he stood up to walk into the hallway.

            I decided to ask this question to my other active eighty and ninety-year olds. And guess what? Many of them had the same thing to say. “Never look to the past.” “Focus on the future.” “Be happy in the moment.” “Be okay with with your life and know that things were meant to be that way.”

            It’s a work in progress for this forty-year-old, but I’m slowly getting there. One day, maybe I’ll be the Mr. Finklestein giving this advice to my doctor.