Like it or not, our phones know our age.
Every day, my feed features several partly hilarious, partly annoying, and wholly infantilizing articles addressing the fact that I’m old and I apparently have no friends.
This sad situation isn’t because I’m a loser or a misfit, the pieces uniformly soothe. Nor, God forbid, does it mean that I’m not a kind, good, generous person. It’s because I’m so generous, kind, and forbearing, in fact, that all along I’ve fooled everyone! Now, finally, I’m claiming my space. I’m stepping into myself. I’m doing me.
An example: “Psychology says people who reach their 60s without close friends aren’t socially deficient or cold, they were often the ones who carried the emotional weight in every friendship for decades and quietly ran out of room to keep doing it.”
I didn’t carry the emotional weight in every friendship for decades. Sometimes I did more than my share; sometimes I did less. A handful of true and loyal friends have remained steadfast over the years. I treasure them and I know they treasure me.
Here’s another one: “Psychology says one of the quieter forms of late life loneliness is the recognition that the people who used to ask for your advice have stopped, not because they don’t respect you, but because they’ve stopped expecting you to have current answers.”
If so — good. That doesn’t make me lonely; it gives me a sense of relief.
But this is my favorite:
“People who start to become difficult in their 60s and 70s often aren’t changing at all — you’re just meeting the version of them that spent 50 years being edited down to keep everyone else comfortable."
I try to be gracious, polite, and sociable. But I have hardly spent 50 years trying to “edit myself down” to make everyone else feel comfortable.
Also, I’m not especially generous. I’m not that kind. I’m a contemplative and an introvert who from the moment I learned to read has given my life to books: first, to reading them; then, after a 10-year apprenticeship in my early 40s, to writing them.
My generosity and kindness, such as they are, largely consist in remaining faithful to my vocation.
W.H. Hudson (1841-1922) was a British naturalist and author, lionized by the literary elite in his day, who grew up on the pampas of Argentina in a loving but eccentric family. From a very young age, he wanted to be outdoors, and he wanted to be alone.
From Ruth Tomalin’s 1982 biography, W.H. Hudson:
“On his fifteenth birthday, still filled with wonder at finding that he was alive, he suddenly asked himself, What do I want? What do I ask to have? — crying in spirit, with the ardent voice of the young Shelley, O World, O Life, O Time!”
“The answer was startlingly clear, but it was one which he dared not yet accept. ‘I want only to keep what I have; to rise each morning and look out on the sky and the grassy dew-wet earth from day-to-day, from year to year. To watch each June and July for spring, to feel the same old sweet surprise and delight at the appearance of each familiar flower, every newborn insect, every bird returned once more from the north.’ ”
He sailed for England at 32 and lived there for the rest of his life, forever nostalgic for the landscape of his youth. He entered into a long, unhappy marriage, was nearly destitute for decades, and lived with his wife in a cramped, three-story boarding house. And wrote. And wrote. And wrote.
He’s best known for the 1904 romantic novel “Green Mansions,” which is set in the Venezuelan jungle and tells the story of a European man who falls in love with Rima, a kind of bird-woman wood nymph who is the last of a mysterious, ancient race.
A self-taught expert on a variety of subjects, he also authored dozens of books on ornithology, Argentine history, geography, flora and fauna, and the English countryside.
Not until his 70s did he finally achieve enough literary success to purchase a small house.
In 1918, at the age of 77, he published a memoir of his Argentine youth, “Far Away and Long Ago.”
He wrote the book during a six-week illness.
“It was to me a marvellous experience; to be here, propped up with pillows in a dimly-lighted room, the night-nurse idly dozing by the fire; the sound of the everlasting wind in my ears, howling outside and dashing the rain like hailstones against the window-panes … and at the same time to be thousands of miles away, out in the sun and wind, rejoicing in other sights and sounds, happy again with that ancient long lost and now recovered happiness!”
“It is not everyone who, looking back in later life, can feel that he would win the approval of his fifteen-year-old self,” observed Tomlin.
Hudson died four years later.
I thought back to my own 15-year-old self: already a voracious reader, already essentially solitary, already a lover of flowers and birds, art, and music, already longing to make those things the center of my life without having a clue how.
Many twists and turns later — here I am.
So, if you’ve reached a certain age, whether surrounded by scores of adoring friends or not, ponder this: What really matters is whether you’ve stayed true to the deepest desires of your heart.
What really matters is whether you’ve grown into the kind of person of whom your 15-year-old self would have approved.
