Anne Lamott: A superpower of older age: Powerlessness

By Anne Lamott

Contributing columnist

February 14, 2024 at 6:00 p.m. EST

I woke up yesterday without too much going on except a cold and cough I’ve had for two weeks, and of course the whole world coming apart like a two-dollar watch. Also, beauty everywhere: clouds descended from the ridge into folds in the hills like puffs and swoops of light gray smoke. I went to wash my face with my glasses still on, and felt like I was in a carwash. For a minute, I believed I had a detached retina — I’ve had a floater for two years, and my ophthalmologist has told me to be on the lookout for changes in vision. I got things sorted and took my morning meds, but then five minutes later was not positive that I had indeed taken them or just meant to.

I caught up on all the ghastly news and then as a counterpoint sat down on the floor to play with the cat. Quiet joy and peace. Then, ring ring ring.

It was a great old friend from childhood calling to say he was hurt by something I’d done. He insisted I had dissed him to an unnamed friend. I expressed how terrible I felt that this had hurt him, and that it was a dumb misunderstanding, and how much I loved him, and asked if we could get together to talk it through, but he said no, he wasn’t ready.

I was stunned. I sat there awhile, partly to think about how to win him back and get him to forgive me but also because to get up from being seated on the floor, I need either a hand or some furniture to lean on, and found neither. I started to do a sowbug, roly-poly move that I’ve developed, where I roll to my side and push up off the ground, but instead I lay there, sad aged old misunderstood sowbug me.

My reflex was to mount a defense. My Jesuit friend Tom Weston once said that he never noticed he was angry, just that he was right, and I acknowledged to my husband that I was both. He shrugged, smiling: Yep. Then I looked at my part in it and, yes, I could see why my friend felt as he did, and shame flickered. But I hadn’t wronged him.

Any loved one’s anger at me feels life-threatening at first. I waited for him to call and straighten things out, but he didn’t. After a while, I rolled awkwardly to my feet like a ton of bricks, went to the kitchen and was eating my body weight in cheese when something suddenly came to me.

It was a dawning realization that this problem was, with a little time, going to sort itself out. I almost smote my forehead. Yo! That had not occurred to me. It was going to be okay. I actually smiled. This is one superpower of being old: You know that things are probably going to work out without your tense, controlling input. Maybe you won’t get your way, which I hate, but the roiled ponds of misunderstanding and hurt will settle.

Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this. You come to forks in the road where you think, I can’t bear this, I can’t do this, I can’t fix this; I see no reason for hope. Plus, what if Iran gets involved, and what if there’s a nuclear exchange, and what if this is the end?

But then, if you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone.

This is the main advice I give younger people who get troubled and stuck. I say, “Yes, it sounds really awful. Just do one good thing, and then another, and breathe. You’re going to be okay.” I tell them what John Lennon said: “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

So I got on with the day, trusting again that, as my husband says, life tilts towards the good.

Rain clouds were gathering, stage left, and a wind began to blow, so I pulled on a thick turtleneck sweater, forgetting to first take off my glasses, which caught in the fabric, trapped me and stabbed me in the eye. (Come to think of it, maybe I am fine and the glasses are the problem.)

I have a number of close friends in their 80s whom I see regularly, some of them quite infirm. On bad days, they say angrily that old age sucks. This is part of the package. We stick together. Ram Dass said that ultimately we are all just walking each other home.

It began to pour, and the branches of the bigger trees whipped and bowed and the more delicate ones moved their arms gently, port de bras.

I waited some more for the friend who’d called to come crawling back to me in a phone call or text. I grew increasingly uptight. Grappling with big life stuff can be too much, so I looked around at my little plot where heart and soul live, and tended to that: tea and clean sheets on the bed. After decades of the bashing, crashing, moaning and groaning, one gets too tired to keep doing this. I was tired.

And it was good.

I released my friend to his own process. When you’re young and vigorous, convinced you are powerful, you have the energy to try to self-will your problems into submission, and it usually makes them worse. By 60 or so, you’ve had enough of participating in the Punch and Judy show of trying to get things to turn out the way you’re positive they should. You’ve learned to surrender. Otherwise, you’ll always be pissed off and exhausted, and that’s no way to live out whatever years you have left.

By dusk, I was less pissed off and exhausted. The rain had stopped. There has been no word from my friend, but I assume there will be, in the fullness of time. But what were the options? I sat back down on the floor with the cat, my home-care nurse. The milky sky was pulling itself down over the ridge like a theatrical scrim, a play of cloud and hillside intermingling. There was a feeling of stasis in the weather — enough with the rain, it seemed to say; let’s all stay quiet and steady, which reflected exactly how I felt. Projection perhaps but, at any rate, I sowbugged my way with a certain goofy grace to a standing position, then all but raised my arms in triumph, a gymnast after a decent landing.