Slowing down

Aging, that is. I have no bucket list needing to be fulfilled in the time I have left. And no children or grandchildren to be around for when they reach their own milestones of life.

I will never be a candidate for one of those Inspire Positive Aging Awards — unless anyone is inspired by an older woman sitting at the bar reading over a pint of cider. I am not one of those rugged older women who wears REI and North Face and Patagonia and walks with ski poles and a day pack with a huge bottle of drinking water and energy bars. I did that kind of stuff when I was younger. Running. Hiking. Cross-country skiing. Snow-shoeing. Bicycling. And I traveled a lot too. Nowhere special — just Europe and North America. I have driven across the United States many times. Now I just want to stay home.

I do not know which is the best part of my day: getting back home to my apartment and closing the door on the world; or, snuggling into bed, turning out the light and cueing up a podcast to fall asleep to. Getting up in the morning, I am usually looking forward to my day, even if I am going to work. But I do not feel the need to distinguish myself in any way. If I accomplish something, it feels good. But I do not want to be obligated to professional and personal growth. I should be slowing down, not speeding up.

I work full time because I need to, financially. I was not in a position to start saving for retirement until I was in my fifties, so I have catching up to do. I am happy in my job, but if I were financially independent, I would give it up in a heartbeat. I am a database analyst and reasonably good at it. But I have been writing computer code for over thirty years, and I do not honestly think I have gotten any better at it. I have just gone from Basic to C to Matlab to R to Python to Java to Salesforce Apex and JavaScript and SQL and PowerBI and back to Python — at roughly the same level of competence. I have done a good job at staying current with technology, and I am very comfortable with AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot. (I even wrote my own wrapper for Gemini in Python.) But I’m tired of having to keep up. And I delude myself a bit there. Today, I was at the co-working space where I go several days a week, and I saw two young men working at coding, each with a large screen hanging off the laptop — and they filled those screens with code that came to them effortlessly. Meanwhile, I have to squeeze out a few lines at a time, usually with assistance from Stack Overflow and ChatGPT. The code I write does work — it just takes me so much time, with lots of false starts and do-overs. I must really like coding, because I do not have much aptitude for it. But tenacity and persistence have allowed me to reach an acceptable level of competence for the job. It would be so nice to bow out — but I need to keep earning a decent salary.

Yesterday, I was walking behind two girls who were lamenting how lame a recent party was — “full of forty-year-olds wearing Patagonia”. As someone who is past sixty (and does often wear a Patagonia hat), I could have been insulted, but I was amused at the idea of forty-year-olds being considered old — because many of them surely would be mortified. I made the decision to accept growing old before I even turned forty. I think it makes it easier if you do it voluntarily while you still pass for youthful, instead of doing it in response to an unexpected reality check in your late forties.

Ageism is all too real, unfortunately. I experience it daily. But the only part of it that seriously worries me is the challenge of having to find a new job at my age. I need to keep working as long as I can, and if I were to lose my current job, I might never find another. Otherwise, the cultural aspects of ageism do not bother me. For one thing, there are a lot of people my age who are still going about their lives as they did when they were younger — and in the last ten years, bars I go to have become more age-friendly, and you see a lot more gray hair now. I am not looking for a relationship of any kind, so it is rather nice to go into a bar alone and not be hit on. I am also not concerned with passing as younger than my chronological age, so microaggressions are simply annoyances as opposed to crushing disappointments.

The featured image from Coronation Street, a soap opera set in the north of England which has been running since the early 1960s. The picture would have been from around 1970. Minnie Caldwell (left) and Ena Sharples (right) are enjoying a bottle of milk stout in the “snug” room at the Rovers, the neighborhood pub. Minnie was mostly a sweet old lady, while Ena was a battle axe. It is quietening to realize that I am now probably around the age of these two characters. Modern styles for clothing and hair allow sixty-something women to look less like old ladies than back in 1970. That is nice — but I think it makes it harder to give oneself permission to slow down. You almost have to work at it!