Growing Old is Glorious

The following is a short presentation I made as part of a Sunday service at my church, the Morristown (NJ) Unitarian Fellowship, honoring our seniors:

Good morning. How many of you plan to grow old and enjoy old age, can I have a show of hands? OK. Good. After all, as I said before, it beats the alternative, doesn't it?

I grew up in a Chinese community and didn’t come to this country until age 28. So I did have a chance to experience both cultures. There are certainly many differences between the Chinese and the American cultures. One of the most striking aspects has to do with people’s attitude towards age. Now, I am talking about the overall picture. There are always lots of exceptions in real life. Also, I am expressing my own views.

In the Chinese culture, people treasure children because they are young and helpless, but even more so because children represent the continuation of their families and themselves in both space and time. As such, they make sure their children are well educated and become good, useful members of society. They also respect their elders for elders represent the source of their own existence and a source of wisdom. Older people also have made their contributions to their families and society. They deserve to be honored and cared for. At the back of their mind, they are also thinking: When I get old, I want to be respected and cared for too.

In the American culture as I have observed, people don’t just treasure their children, they overprotect and overindulge them. That's my opinion. Many people worship the very idea of youth to such an extreme that by comparison they see getting old as a losing proposition. They are afraid to get old. They are reluctant to disclose their age; they feel ashamed of their old age, some even mutilate their body to become superficially younger; they envy the more active life of younger people. No wonder we need so many psychiatrists.

The last time I checked, everyone of us can only get older; no one can get any younger as each day passes. So this negative view on old age is totally self-defeating. If you despise old age, you can only become a loser because you can never win.

Let me suggest that we all, regardless of age, start a revolution to turn this negative perspective on age all the way around. We have to glorify old age. We should be proud to be old. Being old means we have overcome the test of time; it means we have made our contribution to our family and our society; it means we have learned life’s lessons that younger people have yet to encounter. Younger people have their important role in our society; so do the older people, and so do the very old people. This way we'll all be winners.