May We End At a Higher Elevation

“May we end our lives at a higher elevation than where we began.”

On this beautiful fall day, we were pensive, we chatted about what we were going to do as we aged

Recently several of us were standing outside our rustic Lake Wenatchee cabins taking in the beautiful October leaves, breathing the clear air, smelling the mastication (what a word! but it is perfect if you see and hear what the machine is doing) being done to protect the cabins from fire I suppose. 

No matter how beautiful it is, Fall can be a rather melancholic time for me, maybe others, because we were talking about what we were going to do when we got old. The problem, of course, is that most of us already qualify.

We talked about the things people our age seem to talk about more often than we used to. When should we downsize? How long can we stay in our homes? When should we get help? Would we ever move into assisted living? What happens when our bodies begin making decisions that our minds have not approved? Should we allow our kids to tell us what to do. Could we get self-driving cars.

Before long, we were giving one another advice. Much of it had to do with attitude. Look at the glass as half full. Stay interested. Keep moving. Think about the older people we know who are still engaged in life and doing remarkably well.

We also spent a little time being cranky about people who seem to discriminate against us because we are older, particularly those who are increasingly inclined to tell us what we can and cannot do. “You need to be safe” can sometimes sound suspiciously like, “You are old now, so please sit down and don't do anything interesting.”

Of course, safety matters. I don't particularly want to fall off a ladder, wreck the car, or become a cautionary tale told by my children. But as we stood there talking, I began to think there must be more to aging well than staying safe, maintaining a positive attitude, and hanging on as long as possible to everything we used to be able to do.

Then someone brought up Aldo Leopold and an idea that has stayed with me. The words, as we remembered them, were something like this: A good life is one that ends at a higher elevation than it began.

There must be more to aging well than staying safe

I later went looking for the quotation and could not verify that Leopold ever said those exact words. What I did find was interesting. In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold traces the movement of life through an ecological community—rock, soil, plants, animals and back into the land again. In one of those passages, he writes that a beaver “always feeds higher than he dies.” Hmm.

Perhaps somewhere along the way someone turned Leopold's observation into some sort of metaphor for human life. Whether he intended that or not, I like it. What if the important question as we grow older is not simply how long we can remain independent, healthy, productive and safe? What if we also ask whether we are gaining elevation?

Is there a metaphor for life in the quote?

I don't mean status, achievement, money or even physical ability. Aging is rather unreliable in helping us acquire any of those. I mean another kind of elevation. Maybe at seventy-six I can listen better than I did at forty-six. Maybe I can become less certain that I know what somebody else ought to do. Maybe I can become more curious about people whose lives and ideas are different from mine. Maybe I can apologize more easily, forgive a little sooner, notice beauty I once hurried past, and become more comfortable sitting quietly with someone who is hurting without trying to fix the hurt.

For much of our lives, we measure our value by what we can do. We raise children, build careers, solve problems, earn money, organize things, cook meals, fix faucets, serve on committees and keep a remarkable number of balls in the air. Then aging begins taking a few of those balls away. We don't move quite as quickly. We may need help carrying the suitcase. We forget a name we know perfectly well. Eventually we may give up a house, a car, a position, a responsibility or some part of our independence.

It is easy to experience all of this as diminishment, and some of it is. I don't think we do ourselves any favors by pretending every loss is secretly wonderful. Some losses hurt. Some scare us. Some make us angry. There may even be days when the glass really is half empty, and insisting that we see it as half full can feel more annoying than helpful.

But loss and growth can apparently occupy the same human being at the same time.

Even as we become less capable in some ways, perhaps we can become more capable in others. We can become the person who has time to hear the whole story. We can listen without immediately offering advice. We can sit beside grief without trying to talk somebody out of it. We can notice the person standing at the edge of the room. Having made plenty of mistakes ourselves, we may become gentler about the mistakes of others.

As we age we may become less capable in some ways, but perhaps more capable in others

I am especially interested these days in presence. When we are young and busy, presence can seem like doing nothing. We think usefulness requires activity. Yet I have come to believe that giving another human being our full attention may be one of the most valuable things we ever do. Perhaps one gift of growing older is that we can become less hurried about getting somewhere and more interested in who is standing beside us.

Listening may offer a similar possibility. I used to think wisdom had something to do with accumulating answers. Now I wonder whether wisdom has more to do with becoming aware of how much we don't know and remaining curious anyway. After enough years, we have seen confident predictions turn out to be wrong, good people make terrible mistakes, difficult people surprise us with goodness, and our own opinions change. That ought to earn us at least a little humility.

Maybe this is one of the possibilities we miss when we talk about “successful aging.” We hear a lot about keeping our bodies strong, our brains sharp, our numbers in the right ranges, our calendars full and our independence intact. Those are worthy goals. I intend to keep exercising, learning, traveling, laughing, contributing and doing as much as I can for as long as I can. But I don't want the goal of my remaining years to be simply to stay as much like my younger self as possible.

I intend to keep exercising, learning, traveling, laughing, contributing, but I don't want the goal to be stay as much like my younger self as possible

I would like to become someone my younger self could not yet have been.

That may be what gaining elevation looks like. I might become slower to judge and quicker to understand. I might worry less about whether I am impressive and more about whether the person in front of me feels seen. I might become better able to hold joy and sorrow at the same time. I might discover that needing other people isn't necessarily failure but part of belonging to the human community. And as the amount of time ahead of me grows shorter, I might become more awake to the preciousness of the time that is here.

So I am adding another experiment to my continuing research project on living a good life. For a week, try paying attention to elevation rather than decline. Once a day, give someone your complete attention and see whether you can listen without fixing, advising or immediately telling your own similar story. When you catch yourself making a quick judgment about someone, experiment with replacing certainty with curiosity: What might I not understand? And when you notice something you can no longer do as easily as you once did, acknowledge the loss honestly, but also ask whether something else in you is still growing.

For years I have ended gatherings with a blessing for myself and my loved ones:

May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be grateful. May you know you are loved. May you use your hurts and suffering to become kinder, wiser, stronger, and more open to the Sacred. May you know that what you are doing and who you are being matter. May you turn your time, your talent, your attention toward a cause bigger than yourself.

For a week pay attention to elevation instead of decline. What might we still become?

I think I am going to add one more line.

May we end our lives at a higher elevation than where we began.

As you think about the years ahead, not only what you may have to give up, but what you might still become,

how might we journey together to the Good Life by considering what it might mean for us to end at a higher elevation?

(Much of this I explore in Good on You: Building a Sturdy Self, a Warm Heart, and a Full Life)