The upsides of aging

Wrinkled. Wizened. Weak. Images of old age tend to skew to the negative. They shouldn’t, says Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist and author of 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice From the Wisest Americans. “For many elders, life past 70 is better than they imagined it to be. It’s filled with challenges but lots of new horizons,” he says. Here’s some of what the elders he spoke to for his book had to say:

It's all in your attitude.

“If your attitude is that you’re still good, you still enjoy life, there’s still purpose in your life, you’ll do well.”

Embrace the opportunities.

“I have found each decade, each age, has opportunities that weren’t actually there in the previous time. They’ve been joys in each stage of my life. The thing is, people are so afraid of getting old. Don’t worry about it. It’s an adventure.”

You have sage advice to give.

“I enjoy sharing whatever advice I might be able to offer, and you can’t do that when you’re 20. You haven’t built a body of experience, you haven’t built your intellectual curiosity, and you can’t exploit all you’ve learned because you haven’t learned it yet. It’s in the part of life I’m in now that you can put all these pieces together and offer what you have learned.”

You have perspective.

“First of all, Things that were important to me are no longer important, or not as important. The second thing is, I don’t feel responsible in the same way that I used to feel.”