The Joy of Being Aged and Decrepit

By Jan Crawford

It was sweet to see my friend Cristina Casanova approach our outdoor table at Penny Farthing for one of our increasingly rare lunches. I noticed with a touch of sadness that her gait, like mine, had become slower and more labored. Still, at 83, her purplish, fashionably spiky gray hair and devilishly warm smile radiated both gravitas and sauciness. And at 81, sitting in my walker with my jaunty red bowler hat, I suspected that both of us looked like the two Village characters we probably are.

As always, Cristina and I were able to get real with each other quickly. About halfway through our conversation, she stopped, took a moment, and said, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

And after a silence in recognition of what an extraordinary accomplishment I knew that to be, I simply said, “Me too.”

If some passerby had overheard our words, I wonder if they could ever have guessed that, for me, the source of this joy is the experience of increasingly allowing the various identities I’ve inhabited throughout my life to begin to soften, dispersing into a freedom I had never even imagined.

Being aged involves suffering and loss. It can be no walk in the park, quite literally. So, who could find joy in that? Though we may not be able to travel as far and wide, I have found we can go deeper and get clearer. We can become more present, curious and engaged. And whether we are sighted or not, we can see more, feel more and sometimes effortlessly be more. One thing that can seriously obscure that possibility is the many identities we may be over attached to.

A few of those identities—often meaningful and satisfying in themselves—may be our nationality, marital or immigration status, religion, race, sexual choices, gender identity, or more recently and unfortunately, political affiliation. Then there are the less obvious, more personal identities that Buddhist scholar and writer Jean Smith has called “cunning identities.” Those might include Good/Bad, Winner/Loser, Hopeful/Hopeless, Savior/Victim, Beautiful/Ugly, Strong/Weak, Busy Successful West Villager, or Lit Laidback East Villager. One of my own more obvious identities is Devoted Feminist, and a more cunning one is Special, in both Good and Bad ways.

Some identities are programmed in us from birth and we are taught they are integral to who our separate self is. Other identities we may have had to fight for as adults and we may need to stand by them for our own wellbeing and for the common good. Certain identities may even be a way to develop our voices and perspectives within some sense of group safety and support. But even then, I have found that it is dangerous to forget that any identity we are overly attached to is not the deepest level of who we really are.

No matter what our age, we can be curious about our attachments to those identities, loosen ourselves from their unconscious grasps, and begin to discover what less-scripted presence in each moment feels like. And it may help to remember that the alternative to over attachment is not detachment. Instead, it is more direct contact with life.

So, paradoxically, rigid attachments can diminish who we are. They may interfere with our efforts to develop the trust in our own natures that helps us align with what we deeply know but may have forgotten—the trust that allows us to understand what spiritual teacher Krishnamurti pointed to when he said, “I want to know myself. I really do. It is most interesting to know myself because ‘myself’ may be the universe.”

You may be curious about identifying some of your more obvious or cunning identities, how attachment to them may be affecting your life, and how you can inquire into those questions in a surprising new way.

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Jan Crawford, LCSW, SEP, is a Trauma Specialist and author of The Disorderly Soul: Aligning with the Movement of Love and a longtime Village resident.