Happiness Is a Choice You Make: Lessons from a Year Among the Oldest Old

by John Leland

An arrogance of youth, perhaps, is to think that life isn’t worth living once you can’t do the things you do now.

Most of us don’t spend a lot of time with very old people, and when we do, it’s usually about trying to help with their problems, not asking them what makes them happy or fulfilled.

“I was your age, but you were never my age.”

“Happiness to me is what’s happening now. Not the next world; it’s not the dance you’re going to tonight. If you’re not happy at the present time, then you’re not happy.

Our responsibility for the present moment, that’s morality.

“We become what our environment encourages us to be.”

We forget and we remember because we need to. This means there can be quality of life even with memory loss, a prospect I had never considered. An element of wisdom, then, is learning how to use memory loss as an advantage.

“When you’re young, the future is so far away, and you don’t know what will happen to you and the world. So when you’re young, you have more worries than the elderly.

Another was that they became less self-concerned, and more aware of being part of a larger whole. Instead of being lonely, they told him they valued having time alone for contemplation.

Wisdom leads to better decision-making and more realistic expectations, less disappointment when things don’t work out.

to accept that you’re going to die—really accept it—and to feel more contented by the limits, not less.

the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious.”

True generosity includes enabling others to be generous.

They responded not to each other’s perfections but to each other’s gaps. Each flourished by giving the other what he or she needed—that is, by enabling the other to flourish.

There’s nothing easy about accepting things that you don’t believe.

Seeing their future this way stripped away any illusions they might have had about themselves—that they were really some better person waiting to be brought into being, richer, happier, better-looking, thinner, more beloved.

Loss is one of life’s great instillers of wisdom, including the wisdom that finds compensation for the capacities we think we can’t live without.

old age is a concept largely defined by the people who have never lived it.

In a culture that constantly tells us to overcome our limitations, sometimes it is more productive to find ways to live with them.

If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose. But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you—that is, a response to the world as it is—then old age is more another chapter in a long-running story.

Life on earth wasn’t supposed to be perfect; it was just supposed to be life—miracle enough when you thought about it.

Gerontologists consider the tendency to sustain mixed feelings, rather than try to resolve them, as a component of elder wisdom, a recognition that life doesn’t have to be all good to be good, and also that it never will be.

to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.

Too often we think that if only we undo the impediments to our happiness, we can be truly happy. But there are always more impediments, more reasons not to be happy now.

“I will start to worry when something happens. Why worry when it’s not happening? Then why worry when it happens? You deal with it. You waste time worrying and that may never happen what you think. I will deal when it happens, but you don’t waste time. Nothing is hopeless. I don’t even know what it means—hopeless.”