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Key points
- Rejecting ageism, rather than internalizing it, is a key to aging successfully.
- You can define what aging and being older mean for yourself.
- Respect and deference for an older person is earned, as it is for everyone, by showing it to others.
For my last evening in Paris this past May, I signed up for a Champagne and cheese tasting. What could be more fabulously French than that?
The interesting and very tasty master class was held in the lower level of a wine shop in the French capital’s Marais area. Our instructor was young, maybe early thirties, and highly knowledgeable about Champagne—both the French wine region, where he had just spent the afternoon before the class, and the bottled magic produced there.
Throughout the evening, Bastian (as in Sebastian), referred to me (in English) as “sir” in comments like “What does Sir think of this one?”
At first I recoiled inwardly thinking it was the same sort of patronizing ageist comment I find so offputting at age 65 when a younger person refers to me as “young man.” It calls out and reduces me to a number on the calendar.
But another part of me said to chill out and accept the fact that I was clearly the eldest of the six of us in our class, and that maybe Bastian’s comments came from a place of respect. Maybe it wasn’t meant to single me out in a negative way merely because I was older than the others, but to acknowledge that fact.
Maybe I need to not be so ready to take offense about my age?
Maybe that will happen when I more fully embrace this new reality of being “older.” When I fully reject what can feel like the expectation that one should feel ashamed of being "of a certain age." When I define for myself what this time of my life will mean for me—and not let anyone else define it for me, including people my own age who blame anything that goes wrong physically with being “old.”
As clinical psychologist Harold Kooden puts it in his book Golden Men: The Power of Gay Midlife, “Maturation is hard enough when a society is against us, but it is even more difficult when the enemy is within.”
Rejecting, rather than internalizing, ageism is key to aging successfully. Accepting the fact of aging is very different from defining yourself negatively because of your chronological age. Accepting that fact is essential to staying confident in who you are now, not measuring your value as an individual by how many times you have traveled around the sun.
Age “means” only that time is passing. It can also mean—and hopefully does—that you’ve accumulated wisdom from your life’s experiences and gained insight into how to build and enjoy a good life. It means what you want it to mean.
Back in my tasting group on that evening in Paris, I found myself enjoying my younger classmates once I was able to relax and not feel self-conscious about being older—no doubt aided by the bubbly beverages we consumed.
I would liken it to how a college professor enjoys his students and the students enjoy and respect the professor. No one thinks for a minute that the professor is 20 years old. But they do respect his position as their teacher and his older age is an accepted, expected aspect of his being there in front of the classroom.
Being of a “certain age” can bring with it a degree of respect, even deference. But as for people of any age, those things must be earned. Respect and interest in your views come from showing those things to others. They don’t simply come because one is the oldest in the room.
Let’s raise a toast, then, to the privilege of aging and the power to define what that will mean for ourselves.
