Aging flips the mirror

We humans waste so much time judging, assessing approval or disapproval of self and others (the latter generally a disguised extension of the former).

I'm learning that's less so in "the middle years." I love middle age and so far, I love aging. I'm sure I'll reach a point at which declining physical health becomes too distracting. What I wouldn't trade for an ache-free body is aging's effects on the mind.

"My life started at 33," my mother told me when she wasn't yet 40. For her, 33 was the year she began to slip free of the binding opinions of others. I didn't then understand it, but her words have evolved along with me.

"I don't care anymore, and it's great," a compassionate friend told me when 50 hit. "I have finally reached an age at which the opinions of others mean nothing."

Obviously there are limits. People are interdependent, and so naturally care about how those important in their lives see them. But need only up to a point.

Maturity is such a freeing process.

A young friend of 19 is cloaked in tangles of self-reproach. The trade in youth for relative physical beauty, strength, and opportunity is the correlative weakness of mind. Decisions, or lack thereof, are influenced if not wholly dominated by fears of how one appears to others. So exaggerated is this concern that it tends to be based on misimpressions, as well as create them.

We waste time worrying about what others think when it doesn't matter; ironically the net effect is a self-fulfilling prophecy. True confidence is as clear as false confidence is pathetically obvious. All those poor coping mechanisms further exacerbate an unbalanced inner life.

All the while what aging provides is a mirror - a greater ability to turn it inward, rather than holding it out. It's funny, really; now that I need reading glasses my vision is clearer than it has ever been, and likely not as clear as it will be in 10 years. The more reveals the mirror, the greater is self-awareness, the better life becomes. Time previously wasted on denial, fear, anger, self-loathing, or frustrated efforts to pretend finally transforms to self-acceptance.

I am happy to be as I am. I will keep trying to improve the way I interact with the world, but I will waste no more energy worrying about who likes me and who doesn't.

That's what mom was trying to tell me: Judge no more.

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. E-mail [email protected]