The holiday season is at an end. This Grandma can tell. Everyone used to smile, be kind and accommodating, and now it is back to rudeness and ill mannered scowls. I guess the holiday bills have begun arriving.
This Grandma wishes the holiday spirit of the holiday season could last the year long. It seems that happiness is most prevalent to those of us who are now considered long (we never say old).
In the New York Times, December 4, 2014, David Brooks, in “Why Elders Smile,” tells us of new research in happiness:
“When researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate themselves highly. Then there’s a decline as people get sadder in middle age, bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up, so that old people are happier than young people. The people who rate themselves most highly are those ages 82 to 85.”
“Psychologists who study this now famous U-Curve tend to point out that old people are happier because of changes in the brain. For example, when you show people a crowd of faces, young people unconsciously tend to look at the threatening faces but older people’s attention gravitates toward the happy ones.”
There are so many reasons to smile, when the stresses of raising a family, developing a career, paying bills, and building a life, is no longer the focus of ones life, according to Mr.
Brooks:
“Older people are more relaxed, on average. They are spared some of the burden of thinking about the future. As a result, they get more pleasure out of present, ordinary activities. “
“. . . . elder happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at living through effort, by mastering specific skills. I’d like to think that people get steadily better at handling life’s challenges. In middle age, they are confronted by stressful challenges they can’t control, like having teenage children. But, in old age, they have more control over the challenges they will tackle and they get even better at addressing them.”
Of course, wisdom that comes with long age has a research basis:
“First, there’s bifocalism, the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives. Anthony Kronman of Yale Law School once wrote, “Anyone who has worn bifocal lenses knows that it takes time to learn to shift smoothly between perspectives and to combine them in a single field of vision. The same is true of deliberation. It is difficult to be compassionate, and often just as difficult to be detached, but what is most difficult of all is to be both at once.” Only with experience can a person learn to see a fraught situation both close up, with emotional intensity, and far away, with detached perspective.”
“Then there’s lightness, the ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. In their book, “Lighter as We Go,” Jimmie Holland and Mindy Greenstein (who is a friend from college) argue that while older people lose memory they also learn that most setbacks are not the end of the world. Anxiety is the biggest waste in life. If you know that you’ll recover, you can save time and get on with it sooner.”
This Grandma keeps repeating Old Wives Tales, and it seems that they too are rooted in wisdom:
“The ability to grow lighter as we go is a form of wisdom that entails learning how not to sweat the small stuff,” Holland and Greenstein write, “learning how not to be too invested in particular outcomes.”
“Then there is the ability to balance tensions. In “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe argue that performing many social roles means balancing competing demands. A doctor has to be honest but also kind. A teacher has to instruct but also inspire. You can’t find the right balance in each context by memorizing a rule book. This form of wisdom can only be earned by acquiring a repertoire of similar experiences.”
Those of us of long years also know when to speak and when not to speak. We have learned to hold our tongues, observe, and be based in reality. So does the research confirm this:
Finally, experienced heads have intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow. In “The Wisdom Paradox,” Elkhonon Goldberg details the many ways the brain deteriorates with age: brain cells die, mental operations slow. But a lifetime of intellectual effort can lead to empathy and pattern awareness. “What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work,” Goldberg writes, “I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”
This Grandma has noticed recently that “reading” people comes quickly and easily. I am beginning to understand and appreciate the skills that long years have helped me develop. There are some important benefits to gaining those long years. However, I disagree that the capacity for hard mental work is behind me. There are enough studies that show that to keep our mental acuity we need to learn new things and use our brains as we accumulate more years.
Mr. Brooks concludes;
“It’s comforting to know that, for many, life gets happier with age. But it’s more useful to know how individuals get better at doing the things they do. The point of culture is to spread that wisdom from old to young; to put that thousand-year-heart in a still young body.”
With Mr. Brooks’ conclusion, this Grandma contemplates American society that does not revere the wisdom of age, as do other cultures. Maybe we Boomer grandmas can change that all.
We Boomer Grandmas are going to be a mass of smiling faces in our society. Let’s use that happiness for good and spread our knowledge, first to those we love and then to those in a crowd. We Boomers are not shy. A compliment to a stranger may accompany a smile, a precipitate one.
Who was it that said a smile is contagious?
Joy,
Mema
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