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

by John Leland

“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.

If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you’d better do this moment right.”

“I often feel that death is not the enemy of life, but its friend, for it is the knowledge that our years are limited which makes them so precious.”

In numerous studies, researchers have found that seniors who feel useful to others live longer and better, with fewer disabilities, greater mobility, and more resilience to arthritis pain.

I was at the kitchen sink when my wife casually suggested we get divorced. I don’t think I even interrupted my dishwashing.

the meaning of life lies in learning how to form mutually enriching relationships, like musicians in a jazz ensemble, who create melodic openings for the other players by inventing melody lines for themselves.

in a relationship, sometimes taking—allowing the other person to do something for you, rather than insisting on doing it yourself—is also a kind of giving.

How to be happy? Here was a start. Accept whatever kindnesses people offer you, and repay with what you can. Let a friend buy you lunch, then do her a solid in return. You’ll benefit from the favors you receive, but even more from the ones you perform. Don’t begrudge the people who need you; thank them for letting you help them.

But the memory of those last days, and the guilt of having approved the ventilator, never left my mother.

What was true was that married men lived longer. Unmarried women, they found, live as long as their married counterparts, often with more leisure time to devote to themselves.

knew successful people who thought they were open-minded because they were willing to listen to opposing views before rejecting them. But wisdom, John was saying, lay in accepting them even when you listened and weren’t persuaded.

Living in the past may be a cop-out when the future needs you to shape it, but in old age it’s a secure place to be. The drive for trading up, wanting the new and improved, may fuel humanity’s progress, but it also creates a lot of dissatisfaction and anxiety. The elders had arrested this damage.

The elders would tell you to grab it while you can, not agitate for something better.

our national fantasy of living forever, which Emanuel calls the “American immortal,” often leads us to squander the years we have. If we knew that the curtain would come down shortly after seventy-five—or that no one would try to stop it once it started to lower—we’d be more inclined to squeeze all the life possible out of the years before then.

scientists and artists rarely achieve their great cognitive breakthroughs after their forties, because their brains don’t have the firepower needed to forge new solutions to already complicated worlds.

The art of living, after all, lies in living the life you have, in the body that you have.

Advantages alone—even awareness of them—weren’t enough, perhaps because they can be lost. Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so.

Cities like New York can be attractive places to get old, wherever you are from. Stores and doctors are within walking distance, and public transportation makes it possible to get around without a car. Whatever language you speak, you can find a community of others who do as well, including doctors and social workers. No one wants to be the only Fukienese speaker in an isolated retirement community in Arizona, or the only one talking Tagalog in a ballroom dancing class in Steamboat Springs.

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.

The lesson was to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.

“The most important thing is money for your last day,” she said. “One tenant here, a peasant from China, refuses to talk about her funeral. She says, ‘If I die, let them throw me in the garbage. Why should I pay money for a funeral?’”

This is what Ping taught me about thinking like an old person: try to be flexible, always recalibrating goals or what made a life worth living.

She knew how to give up things that once seemed important but no longer did, choosing happiness from among the stuff available to her.

The lesson of John Sorensen was that to accept death was to accept life, and to accept life was to live in joy, however dire the circumstances around you.

She needed more of what she had now, even if it meant leaving the conflict unresolved.

Her lesson was the subtlest of all those I learned over the year. She had two people who loved her, each in a different way. Her wisdom was to figure out what they wanted to give her, and to create the circumstances that enabled each to give it.

“I’m always happy,” she said, and then gave her definition of happiness: “Not to think of any bad things. To let everything go. But young people are too young to understand.”

what was there to learn from Helen? She seemed to make life difficult for herself and the people around her. But as the year went on, I saw that I had this exactly wrong. For the people she cared about most, Zoe and Howie, she made life infinitely richer.

What could be better? Sometimes I get too much attention. My husband and I did something right.”

For Ruth, the sorrows of old age were the things that happened to her, and the joys were the things she did for herself.

Instead of fighting for my way at work, I thanked my editors for making my writing better; I asked advice instead of feeling I should know all the answers. I called my mother more often, also my son, with questions rather than answers.

Researchers have long observed that older people who feel a sense of purpose in their lives tend to live longer, fuller, and healthier lives than people who

If I have any problems that emerge, I say, okay, I will leave it alone for now, let time work on it. I don’t dwell on anything that is problematic. I leave it alone and as time goes, very often it straightens out by itself.

“Have you ever thought about how amazing, really amazing, life is?”

The neurologist Oliver Sacks, on learning that he had terminal cancer of the liver, wrote that the nearness of death gave him a sudden clear focus, and no patience for anything inessential. “I cannot pretend I am without fear,” he wrote. “But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Even after my year with the elders, I realized, I still saw my mother’s life through my prejudices about old age. The life she actually led was something else.

“I never thought about what would happen if it rained.”

The good things in life—happiness, purpose, contentment, companionship, beauty, and love—have been there all along. We don’t need to earn them. Good food, friends, art, warmth, worth—these are the things we have already. We just need to choose them as our lives.