I’ve been thinking about the language of aging for a very long time.
We have so many words for getting older in English, and an astonishing number of them seem to point in the same direction: down.
Then there are the expressions that are supposed to be compliments but somehow aren’t. “You look good for your age.” A “woman of a certain age.” Even “late bloomer,” a phrase I have never liked. I wrote my first book at 50 and started running marathons around the same time. Was I late? I don’t think so. I was exactly on time for my own life.
Words matter because they don’t simply describe our experience; they can quietly tell us what to expect from it.
If we spend our entire lives hearing that getting older means becoming less relevant, less attractive, less capable, less interesting, is it really surprising that so many people approach aging with dread?
That was the idea behind my recent conversation with writer and performer Maggie Rowe, co-host of the wonderful podcast 50 Words for Snow. Maggie and her co-host explore words from other languages that have no direct English equivalent. And as she began looking across cultures, she noticed something fascinating: other languages often have more respectful, encouraging and optimistic ways of talking about growing older.
One Japanese word Maggie shared describes aging as ripening—becoming more complex and layered with time.
Think about that for a moment.
We would never say that a piece of fruit has “declined” because it ripened. Ripening suggests that something has developed. Deepened. Become more fully what it was meant to become.
What a different way to think about ourselves.
Maggie introduced me to another concept that views accumulated experience as a kind of treasure trove—not simply years lived, but insight gained and an increasing ability to understand how to live a good life.
I love that idea because it recognizes something our culture often overlooks: there are things we actually get better at with age.
We become better at knowing what matters.
Better at walking away from what doesn’t.
Better at choosing the people we want around us.
Better at understanding ourselves.
And, perhaps, better at appreciating an ordinary day.
None of this is an argument for pretending that aging is easy. I have never believed in sugarcoating it. Bodies change. Loss happens. There are challenges that come with getting older, and some of them are very real.
But that is only part of the story.
Where are the English words for the confidence that comes from having lived through hard things and realizing you can survive them?
Where is the word for the freedom of caring a little less about what everyone else thinks?
Where is the word for discovering something completely new at 65 or 75?
Where is the word for becoming more yourself?
Maggie and I also talked about the Japanese idea of shoshin, or “beginner’s mind”—approaching something with curiosity rather than assuming that because we are older, we already know how the world works.
That may be one of the most important ideas of all . . . because curiosity keeps the world from shrinking.
And then Maggie said something during our conversation that stayed with me:
“One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is overvaluing status and undervaluing purpose.”
As she gets older, she said, she wants to reverse that.
I suspect a lot of us understand exactly what she means.
For so much of adulthood, we are building. Careers. Families. Reputations. Identities. We spend decades becoming somebody.
Maybe one of the gifts of getting older is realizing that we no longer have to work quite so hard at proving who that somebody is.
Maybe we get to ask a different question: What matters to me now?
I came away from my conversation with Maggie convinced that English needs a richer vocabulary for aging—not because new words will magically make getting older easy, but because the words we use help define what we believe is possible.
And I want the possibilities to be much bigger than “still looks good for her age.”
Listen to this episode of AGE BETTER, “English Doesn’t Have the Words We Need for Growing Older — with Maggie Rowe HERE
Then I want to hear from you.
If you could choose one word to describe the experience of growing older—not what we lose, but what we gain—what would it be?
