Four Punches in the Face That Woke Me up to Old Age

How our beliefs about old age come true for good or for bad

Red-rock cliffs at Capital Reef National Park in Southern Utah — Author's photo.

When I say beliefs, I'm not talking about affirmations or wishful thinking. I'm talking about ground-breaking research by a Yale Professor on the importance of the mind-body connection. (I'll outline it below.)

This research is important to me because it validates my existing perspective on aging, based on my spiritual practice and my personal experience in the testing grounds of old age.

Old age is not for cowards, dreamers, or schemers. If you try to bluff your way through it, old age will call your bluff. And old age always wins in the end. The key to making old age an ally is to accept it unconditionally.

Acceptance is the best strategy for our senior years. It’s the best way to do almost anything. If your first approach to any situation is to accept the reality of what's happening now, you'll have a more accurate map to guide you.

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I think of old age as an adventure movie about an old man in denial of his age who begins to realize he's on a hero's journey, a quest, and a search for enlightenment in the most challenging time of his life — and how he ends up having the time of his life!

It's my movie, so I figure I get to write the screenplay.

Our various ailments and setbacks don't come at us in a linear progression, like a turtle slowly making its way across the desert. If they did, we'd hardly notice them.

They come at us suddenly like a punch in the face.

Punch #1

One day, in my early 70s, I noticed that my walking gait was strange — not fluid and even, but disjointed. I called it herky-jerky. I had a sudden realization that I was walking like an elder. I clearly remember exactly where I was when I realized, "I'm not getting old — I am old."

I'm sure my uneven gait didn't begin on that day, but that was the day I noticed it. It knocked me down, and I had to psychologically pick myself up from the sidewalk and carry on.

"I'm an old man."

It was a shocker.

It was an awakening to a physical fact of my life that I may be able to improve on the margins, but I can't eliminate it. I can't turn back time.

Time marches on, and unless I march along with it, things will become (psychologically) more and more difficult as I get older. I'm walking like an old man because I am an old man. I’ll be better off if I accept it.

Old age is always hiding in the bushes and behind every corner, but at some point in our lives, it begins to show itself openly, and it usually shows itself in ways that we don't like.

Punch #2

I had a heavy psychological blow at 68 when my therapist asked me if I wanted to join a weekly seniors group she was running. I was inwardly shocked, surprised, and offended because I didn't see myself as a senior. Looking back, I find it hilarious. I was well into old age and was in denial about it. I wrote about it here.

What did it take for me to be so in denial about my old age, yet not be aware of it? I had a chronically sore right knee, diminishing stamina, had less energy than I'd ever had, and I was 68. I was grumpy and didn't feel I had a purpose in life. I was getting old, but I didn't admit it.

I was writing the screenplay for my old age with my beliefs. But I didn't know it yet.

What does it take to have denial like that? It was my unconscious ageism aimed at myself. I was full of all the old age tropes and stereotypes, probably believed them, and I didn't want to have to apply them to myself.

Stereotypes like these.

Old people are frail, gray, and they move slowly — they even smell funny. Their smartphones technologically challenge them, and they need to go to the Apple Genius Bar, but they can't find it, or they don't even know it exists. And so go the stereotypes about old age that we've been spoon-fed since we were children.

How can positive beliefs about aging help us live longer?

Yale professor Becca Levy, PhD, wrote the book "Breaking the Age Code" on how our beliefs determine how well and how long we live.

Each fall I start my Health and Aging class at Yale by asking my students to think of an old person and list the first five words or phrases that come to mind… just write down whatever associations pop into your head.

Take this response from Ron, a seventy-nine-year-old violin maker outside of Boston: ‘Senile, slow, sick, grumpy, and stubborn.’ Now consider this description from an 82-year-old woman named Biyu in China . . . ‘Wise, loves Peking Opera, reads to grandchildren, walks a lot, and kind.’”
 — Becca Levy, PhD, Breaking the Age Code

Ron and Biyu are writing the scripts to their old age movie, and they don't even know it. We all set the tone for our futures with our thoughts. Ron's is tragically negative, and Biyu's is relentlessly positive.

We predict our futures daily with our beliefs about old age.

Professor Levy's Yale University Study found that older people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive views of aging. We can add years to our lives just by changing our minds.

Try it yourself. Quickly write down five words or phrases that immediately come to mind when you think of an older person. Here's what I came up with:

• Frail, Slow, Forgetful, Pale, and Weak.

Whenever I do this exercise, I always come up with a negative list like that. I know the stereotypes are not true, but they seem to rise up from some primal part of me. I have been brainwashed since childhood about aging. However, Professor Levy believes that we can change our beliefs about aging, regardless of our age. Adopting positive beliefs about aging can add years to our lives.

Punch #3

One evening, I was in a Buddhism class at the San Francisco Zen Center, and someone asked me to walk her to her car. It can be dangerous for a woman after dark in the city. And her car was up a block-long hill. Halfway up, I got winded and had to stop and catch my breath. It was embarrassing for me to become winded in front of a woman roughly my age who wasn't having trouble with the hill.

Was it age, or just not being in shape? I guess it was a little of both. But it was a punch in the face. I wanted to be able to tell her I had a "condition" I'm dealing with, but the "condition" was old age, and I didn't want to talk about it then. If I had been brave enough to talk about it with her, I'm sure she would have listened. She was about my age but wasn't at all winded walking up the hill.

At various times, we'll notice we're running out of steam, like The Little Engine That Couldn't. Just believing that I can easily walk up hills might be helpful, and daily exercise might also be beneficial. The only thing that won't help is getting depressed about the fact that I'm not young anymore. That will make everything worse.

If it comes down to depression or acceptance, I’ll take acceptance every time.

Punch #4

I always felt sorry for people with diabetes 2— people who eat too many desserts and bad carbs. People who are obese and don't exercise. People who get lax about taking care of their health. In other words, people other than me.

A month ago, this wake-up punch arrived in my email.

Gary, glad you updated your labs, thyroid is in range but sugar is elevated. I think you were planning a checkup in June, hopefully talk to you soon to discuss further.

Your 3 month average sugar called Hgb A1C % is elevated at 5.8 (H). Normal is 5.6 and under. If A1C is 6.5 and above, this is considered diabetes. You’re in the prediabetes phase, and we want to prevent it from progressing to diabetes.
 — Email message from my doctor

I walk like an old man. I'm still bound by old-age stereotypes. I get winded walking up hills. And now I find I'm pre-diabetic? I often say, “Old age is just one damn thing after another.”

I often use that statement, but it's misleading. “Just one thing after another” sounds like there are things separate from me, happening to me. That’s not how things work. There is nothing separate from me.

As a Buddhist, I know my health is what it is today because of a long chain of day-to-day decisions I have been making for the last 60 years of my adult life. If I had continued with my plant-based diet, which I followed in the early 1990s, moderated my drinking, and maintained my running and walking habits, as I did in the 1980s, my A1C would probably not be elevated here in 2025.

Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

But those horses left the barn decades ago. The past is gone, and all I have is now. So I'm going to change my diet, moderate my drinking, and exercise daily. My success or failure in lowering my A1C results will be measured by the report the lab sends me after my next panel of tests. It's up to me.

Sure, I have health problems, but I'm 80. The fact that I have lived this long seems to be a happy accident. People who have lived much cleaner lives than me are dead. So why me? Why am I still here?

The only thing I can say is that maybe it's my positivity about old age and life in general. I've always been a knee-jerk optimist. It's how I'm wired — not the result of some carefully thought-out longevity strategy. Nope. I don't live by strategies. I make one mistake after another and correct each one as I go (if I can).

I embody baseball great Yogi Berra's paradoxical wisdom: "I'm lost but I'm making good time." It's way too late for me to become a careful budgeter and planner. And anyway, that wouldn't be me. I honestly think that if I were a great strategic planner, budgeter, and logical thinker, I'd be dead by now.

This rolling, tumbling, mess of a person is me at 80. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Gary
June 2025