A few years ago I met a man who said he was sixty-five. His jawline said thirty-five, the eyes said eighty. He had lost his wife two years ago. He’d smoothed grief with surgeons’ hands, learned to fly small planes, leapt off bridges with a bungee cord, and proposed—serially—to women half his age.

Over coffee he told me he was done with mourning. I nodded, but something in me balked. I, too, had been standing close to loss. His bravado felt familiar: not strength, exactly, but a refusal to sit with the ache long enough for it to teach us what it knows.

We don’t like to talk about aging unless we can laugh it off or fight it off. We call ourselves “forever 29,” pretend our reading glasses are a quirky accessory, and search for creams that promise to erase what life has already given. Entire industries thrive on our fear: of grey hair, of softening bodies, of mortality itself. But denial isn’t youth; it’s a kind of developmental stall. When we freeze ourselves at an old milestone, our bodies continue forward while the mind refuses to grow into the room it has now entered. The dissonance is exhausting.

I come from a small town in Kashmir where age was an asset. Power gathered around our elders like shawls in winter. My great-grandmother headed a village school at a time when that was quietly radical. She was then promoted to the district level job where she controlled all high schools. My grandfather, a headmaster at a boys school, reported to my grandmother at work. He lived into his nineties—sharp, willful, tireless, in complete control of his family. He was uncrossable.

So, in our family, no one wished to be younger; everyone assumed wisdom was the rightful interest accumulated on years already lived. Children learned early to listen. The old did not vanish; they presided.

That inheritance shaped me in an Indian classroom years later. During my Masters degree in US, a young woman announced, half-joking and half-earnest, that 29 was the perfect age and everything after it sounded like decay. She glanced at me—mid-forties then—with a quick apology. I surprised us both by saying, honestly, that I would not go back. At 29 I was efficient and ambitious and permanently out of breath. I worked fourteen hours and slept with a to-do list in my head. I wanted too much approval and owned too little of my own life. Aging, for me, has been a slow apprenticeship in limits and liberty: the right to say no, the courage to be misunderstood, the plain joy of not dressing for other people’s eyes.

We often define aging by losses: elasticity, speed, fertility, the ability to hear a child’s whistle from across the room. These are real. Knees do complain on staircases. Presbyopia is not a myth invented by opticians. But something else grows while the collagen thins. Patience, for one. Pattern-recognition. The knack of choosing the fight that matters and letting the other ten go. A gratitude that arrives quietly at 6 a.m. with the first cup of chai. The tenderness of watching your children become themselves—and knowing, at last, you cannot (and should not) steer their weather.

In India, we are living longer than our grandparents did, and faster than our bodies often enjoy. The result is a cultural glitch: longevity without corresponding depth. We idolize young hustle while outsourcing elder care. We equate beauty with tightness instead of presence. We forget that every society needs elders in the fullest sense of that word—not just people who are older, but people who are willing to grow old.

Growing old is not passive. It is a disciplined choice to metabolize experience into discernment. It means letting grief do its work so that it doesn’t redirect itself into compulsions—shopping bags, gym mirrors, serial romances, whatever keeps us spinning fast enough to miss ourselves.

The gentleman with the immaculate jawline believed he was “moving on.” Perhaps. But movement isn’t the same as progress. Sometimes progress is stillness: sitting with the emptiness at the dinner table until you can name it; noticing that your impatience with your teenager is grief in disguise; asking for help and discovering that dependence, too, is a human skill.

When I think of aging, I don’t picture decline. I picture a widening. At 20, my world was a bright circle around my ambitions. At 40, it stretched to take in my children’s moods, my parents’ medical appointments, my friends’ quiet crises. At 50 and beyond, the circle keeps widening—toward community, toward contemplation, toward the strange peace of knowing that very little is truly under control and that this is, in fact, survivable. I dress more simply now. I don’t care about impressions, conventions, societal norms or permissions.  I relish solitude without fear. I can host both joy and sorrow at the same table and not rush either to the door.

None of this is to romanticize illness or poverty or the random cruelties that land differently on different bodies. It is to say that aging is not merely what time takes; it is also what time gives if we are willing to receive it. We can choose our metaphors. The anti-aging metaphor is war: battle lines, miracle weapons, the enemy within. The alternative is craft. Aging as the art of joining. Joining the person we were to the person we are. Joining our private story to the larger human one. Joining the limits of a day to the abundance of its meanings.

What does this look like on an ordinary Tuesday? It looks like forgiving yourself for the afternoon nap and noticing how much kinder you are at 5 p.m. because of it. It looks like standing up from the floor more slowly and finding, to your surprise, that the pause is full of affection for your own body. It looks like letting your daughter teach you a new phone setting and letting your pride take a day off. It looks like finally declining the family role you never wanted—the peacemaker, the accountant, the always-available one—and discovering that boundaries, too, are a form of love. Above all, it looks like accepting that you do not know all, that your children are way more intelligent, resourceful, hard working and stressed out than you were at their age, and letting them take their decisions without interfering.

If we keep pretending that aging is an embarrassing rumor, we will miss its curriculum. We will keep chasing a counterfeit youth while our real, hard-won aliveness waits patiently in the next room. The work, then, is to practice visibility. Wear your years the way Kashmiris wear winter: with preparation and without apology. Tell a young colleague what you wish you had known. Ask an elder what you still need to learn. Invite your parents’ stories while they remember the names. Put your phone face-down during dinner. Say thank you more often. Say no more easily. Say yes more deliberately. And above all, keep yourself busy. Embrace AI. Attend online classes. Expand your knowledgebase. Promote curiosity. Write a memoir, or short stories. Paint that painting. Grow those plants. Walk those walks and take those trips. Whatever you do, do not vegetate, do not stop utilising your brain. Whatever you don’t use, you lose.

As for the man who insisted he was sixty-five, I hope he found a softer courage. Denial is a loud armor; it clangs. Acceptance is quieter, but it frees the hands. In the end, I think of aging as the gradual alignment of the inner and the outer. A prep time to know ourselves, to be ourselves, and to prepare for our next exciting adventure into the next life. The face learns to tell the truth the heart has been living into for years. The mind becomes a kinder narrator. The body, even with its aches, becomes a home.

“Come, grow old along with me,” Browning wrote. The line isn’t a lament. It’s an invitation. Not to disappear, not to retreat into nostalgia, but to keep arriving in your own life with the sort of attention that youth, busy surviving, seldom has time for. If we can do that—if we can resist the temptation to be forever 29 and instead be fully, gloriously present at 49 or 67 or 83—we might yet exchange our fear for something sturdier: a life that fits.